The Renaissance aspects were originally embraced by the South of Italy, which influenced across Europe. Individualism demonstrated as an ability to contact God individually and the New Learning, which helped and invoked German and other people to develop and think critically. These aspects were led to the Protestant Reformation.
Politically, the Reformation begins in Germany because they felt irritated and had some hated toward many Catholic Churches controlled by the papal system. They felt that their independence and national pride were taken. Economically, they had to pay the form of indulgences, which is unfair. As the religious issues, the crisis in the corruption Catholic Church devastated its credibility as the Avignon Papacy and Schism.
The Reformation led by Martin Luther had changed people’s view of women’s pride and dignity. For instance, women are not concubines but wives, and they can reveal their own relationships to men, and they believe they can be close to God individually.
There were three religious movements afterward. The Calvinists believed in predestination and the postponement of pleasure that is capitalism. Anabaptists believed we could be a Christian merely by our pure heart that we need to be baptized repeatedly as an adult. The Anglican Church was created by King Henry VIII because of changing his strict religion to remarry and have a son. Renaissance humanism is composed of three aspects of the Yearning of the Classics, Individualism, and the New Learning using as the study of classical texts, and destroying the medieval mindset and thinking effectively.
The Renaissance Humanism
Renaissance humanism is composed of three aspects. Firstly, the Yearning of the Classics, which Francesco Petrarch, the father of Renaissance humanism, tried to invoke Italian glorious history and knowledge. He was the first person to represent the Yearning of the Classics writing The Letters from the Ancient Dead. His work complained of how abhorrent events had become compared with Cicero (the wonderful first-century Rome)
Secondly, Individualism was led by Pico della Mirandola who created impacting work called Oration on the Dignity of Man, believing we can choose to be whatever we want to be as ugly and below as pigs or as beautiful and high as angels individually. He tried to emphasize that society needed to be more open and to give more value to human creativity.
The last aspect was the New Learning, which demonstrated a method of learning and helped people to be able to understand and analyze effectively. Lorenzo Valla represented this last aspect and emphasized that we need to learn to accept new discovery ideas. His famous work was the evidence that he proved that the Donation of Constantine collecting by the Church was a counterfeit document, and pointing the Bible translation mistakes.
In Renaissance, art and architecture are the most critical aspect the people had affections in classical nude sculptures focusing on the natural world in which religious figures were presented in their humanity, such as David (Michelangelo) and Jesus. The Italian and Northern Renaissance had different relationships, mostly towards the Catholic Church. Italian Renaissance was mostly influenced, and their artists and sculptors were patronized by the Catholic Church, but the Northern, such as Germans, embraced Protestanism, which expresses the diversity of arts and religions. They also have quite different thoughts of theology and religious, cultural worships that caused the segregation of Catholicism to Protestantism, which have still affected our humanities today.
