AT Modern European History: Unit I Study Guide: Renaissance(s): Italian, N. Europe & Ottoman

FORMAT

You will be asked to use historical thinking skills (context, catena, sourcing for kaleidoscope, periodization, competing narratives, and corroboration) to analyze sources that are NEW to you. This is called an SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT requiring CRITICAL THINKING. New sources could include:

* excerpts or pieces of new primary and secondary sources

* paintings (early modern) or photographs (late modern)

* material culture

* Youtube videos

* excerpts from newspaper articles

To ease your mind, six examples of kinds of questions are included. The more familiar you are with the historical concepts and themes we pinpointed in class, the more likely you will be able to show your thinking about the new sources.

CONTEXT

You might be asked to analyze how the geographical, cultural, social, economic or political setting of a particular historical era influenced the creation of an excerpt or artifact.

CATENA

Your focus is on identifying the chain of circumstance, the web of action, or the series of unrelated events constructed into an argument within the work. For example, you might be asked to identify what historical themes or concepts you think are illustrated within the excerpt or painting and how it drove the author's catena.

KALEIDOSCOPE

You might be given two new facts regarding an author’s background and be asked how it affects your analysis of the excerpt.

CORROBORATION

You will be given a new source and asked to provide corroboration for the claims made within the source using some combination of sources read and discussed in class.

COMPETING NARRATIVES

You might be given two conflicting excerpts with source information and be asked to explain which is more reliable and what were the factors you relied upon to decide.

PERIODIZATION

You might be asked to explain the extent to which a specific document derives from a particular time period or identifiable era.

STUDY GUIDE

As we discussed, the Black Death (begins 1347) caused terrible disruption in Europe, first in Italy, which would also recover first and resuscitate its trading networks (which had brought the plague in the first place). The Italian city-states had developed as flourishing commercial and banking centers and had monopolized the trade in Mediterranean areas, which included trade between Asia and the West. Trade was probably even better after the Black Death because the Italian city-states' near death experience makes people want to enjoy life, including the expensive cloths, jewelry, furs, and silks it could offer. Popes and monarchs in need of funds would borrow from Italian merchant-bankers. Trade and banking created huge profits that could be used to sponsor great artistic projects, and painters and sculptors thrived among the creative chaos. Popes, merchant-bankers, and other elites became patrons of great artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. For peasants and the urban poor, by and large illiterate, the Renaissance did not happen (though we are on the cusp of the Protestant Reformation, which did).

The term Renaissance itself was created by a French historian in the 18th century, meaning "rebirth," and Renaissance thinkers dove into the Greco-Roman past. The Renaissance was marked by secularism, individualism, and humanism (Perry and Rice). No longer thinking solely of salvation and God's plan, society moved to a worldly, non-religious outlook. They believed themselves capable of great things and worked hard to develop the talents and virtues of the so-called Renaissance man, as laid out in such popular self-help books as Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier. In Italy, much of what is studied is humanism, meaning the study of ancient Greco-Roman works.

Due to the printing press, Renaissance ideas (including humanist literature) spread from Italy further north to Germany, France, England, and Spain. Northern humanists were more concerned with original Christianity than with the Greco-Roman world and sought to resolve societal issues. The north, unlike the Italian city-states, were home to the "New Monarchs" as exemplified by Henry VII of England, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and Francis I of France, who consolidated their power as against the demands of the church and the feudal lords by increasing revenue through taxation, establishing large standing armies, and creating loyal bureaucracies in service of the state. Machiavelli sees these governments to the north as the political reality in which vulnerable and fractured Italian city-states competed for survival. How could they survive French and Spanish invasions without The Prince? Answer: they didn't. They suffer repeated attacks by France, Spain, etc., and the Renaissance ends in Rome in 1527 as it is sacked. The Italian city-states, unlike the new monarchies in the North often dominating them politically and militarily, will not unify until 1870. The Renaissance arguably either served as the basis of modernity or was an extension of the prior eras of interactions, particularly with the Middle East.

You should review the following:

How does Manchester outline the work of a historian? William Manchester's Author Note as it pertains to your understanding of context (the setting and circumstances of a particular age), chains of circumstance/catena (close reading to pinpoint arguments as to how events are interrelated according to author’s thesis) and kaleidoscope (perspective or point of view). Make sure you understand these terms. Think about the example we laid out from Michael Rose's How the American Revolution Saved the British Empire.

What is Rice's concept of periodization and how did it capture the differences in the medievalists' and humanists' view of history? Rice excerpt on the Foundations of Early Modern Europe as it relates to periodization (“the way a man divides the past into periods reveals some of his most basic, and often unconscious, assumptions”), the difference between the point of view and periodization of the humanists and the medievalists, and the study and use of history by humanists.

How does the kaleidoscope for humanists differ from that of the medievalists on human nature (also called "nature of man")? How do these kaleidoscopes shape the institutions (political, social, and economic) of the Renaissance? Perry's Ch. 13 The Renaissance: Transition to the Modern Age as it relates to how distinctly modern forms emerged during the Renaissance in Southern and Northern Europe. Note how the chapter is broken down. There is a paragraph defining “modern forms,” a section on the Italian city-states as the source of the Renaissance ideals of humanism, individualism, secularism, and patronage of arts.

Are Northern humanists different from Italian humanists? Note the second half of the Perry chapter on the Renaissance changed as it spread north to Germany, France, Spain, and England, including the role of the printing press, censorship and how it will lead to the Protestant Reformation. Why do many historians view the Renaissance as the birth of modernity, while others give a "word of caution? This introduces our last skill of corroboration or competing narratives (the extent to which the narratives or interpretations of multiple sources match or do not match)

Did women have a Renaissance based on the Herlihy article? To what extent do the marriage patterns in the Herlihy article reflect modern marriage? Herlihy's The Family in Renaissance Italy as it relates to family issues broken down by gender, class, age, marriage, kids, and mothers in urban and countryside settings as well as the role of women in defining and setting the standard/fashion of Renaissance culture.

Who are the New Monarchs? How did they create the foundation for national (or territorial) states? In other words, what ingredients are required for a monarch to gain control over a region in which a distinct people live? Consider the cases of England, France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire. Machiavelli's The Prince, Chapters 15-19 and the nature of man, his use of historical examples as evidence, and the attributes of the ideal Prince. Remember he was writing in the context of the rise of the New Monarchs in the North.