What affect did the Renaissance have on early modern thinking on the body?
Uploaded by fionaone on Nov 25, 2012
What affect did the Renaissance have on early modern thinking on the body?
The waning of the middle ages had been a traumatic period in most peoples’ lives. One third of the population of Europe had died in the ‘Black Death’ of 1348. It also signalled the beginning of the decline of Papal power, which led to religious and political unrest in most of Europe. The Renaissance was also a period when people began to visualise things in different ways, or rather when they gained new perspectives or insights and began to question the natural order of things as they knew them. The word renaissance literally means ‘rebirth’ in French. It was a period where the restraints of the middle ages were abandoned, and the study of art, and literature reverted back to the classical. It was also during this period that trade increased, and correspondingly, so did wealth. With this increased wealth, people began to travel and their ideas began to spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world, as can be seen in Charles V, Emperor and King of Spain, Instructions for Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, 1535 . People also began to see themselves as individuals , as men and women, and also to express themselves more. This essay will examine how the way peoples changing ideas had an affect on the thinking on the body.
Political unrest, led to changes in the political body of Europe. The political body of Europe in the 1400s consisted of Kingdoms, Empires, and States. During the middle ages there had been political unrest and challenges to the papacy, culminating in the Great Schism. This unrest led to people questioning the absolute authority of the church, which was the forerunner to people thinking about their spiritual bodies in terms of the individual rather than the collective. In the middle ages, the church was run by bishops who usually came from wealthy families. Their dioceses were staffed by priests and bishops. People’s ‘beliefs were expressed through rituals and actions’ . After the Great Schism (1378 – 1415), and the council of Constance, the door was open for what the church called heretics. People complained about how the church was run, citing absentee bishops and wayward priests and thought that their money would be better...