Northern Humanism Research Paper

779 Words4 Pages
Renaissance means rebirth. The renaissance which began in the fourteenth century is a socio-cultural movement that began in Italy and slowly grew throughout Europe, and a hundred years later found its way to England. This era was a period of intellectual, cultural, and scientific awakening, they emphasized the ideas of the humanist. When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Ottoman Turks invaded the byzantine empire capital in 1453, which led to a huge evacuation of scholars from Greek to Italy. They also took with them their previous manuscripts which was then circulated all over Europe. The humanist ideas are ideas founded in Roman and classical Greek thought, from cultural influence, education to art and from philosophy. This rebirth or renaissance…show more content…
They also where different in their magnitude and their reach, the northern humanist were a small number in size and often secluded while the Italian humanist were distributed over a large area and popular. Due to the fact that the northern humanist cities were small their expansion was slow and informal when compared to the Italian humanist. The northern European humanist had fewer princely patrons of learning, which means that the northern humanism was less aristocratic. The northern humanism focused les on Latin classics and more focus on the scriptures which was more of a Christian character thus they were called, “Christian humanist”. The northern humanist where not interested in the study of metaphysics like the Italian humanist were but they were interested in morals, ethics and strive towards proper scholastic. The incorporation of religion along with philosophy of humanism was a huge difference between the Italian and northern humanism. The northern humanist were hugely influenced by religion due to the fact that most of their schools where controlled by the church, which had produced clergymen. The northern humanist made use of the classical studying style of the Italian humanist and incorporated it to patristic and biblical study, completely changing the meaning of humanism to their own

More about Northern Humanism Research Paper

Open Document