Cultural Renewal and Christian Expansion
The term “Renaissance” is now universally used to designate the literary and artistic revival that initially developed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, and then spread to most of Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance was a remarkable period of cultural regeneration, which reached the peak of its influence in the 1500s. Its central theme was that today’s culture could be renewed by a creative engagement with the cultural legacy of the past, above all the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome.
The related term “humanism” is widely used to refer to the philosophy of the Renais- sance. This term is easily misunderstood by modern readers. In the twenty-first century, this word is often used to mean something like “atheism” or “secularism,” identifying a worldview that excludes belief in – or at least reference to – the divine. At the time of the Renaissance, the word “humanism” had a very different connotation. It referred to the underlying ideas of the Renaissance, by which western European culture might be renewed by an appeal to its origins in classical Rome and Athens. Humanism was a quest for elo- quence and excellence, grounded in the application of the wisdom of the classics to the present.
