The fourteenth century has been dubbed the calamitous’. And in a political sense, this position is justifiable. Yet a focus on its calamities might blind the reader to some of its musical triumphs.
All in Renaissance
Dante and Petrarch: Last of the old, first of the new
Less than a decade separates two of the grandest literary masterworks of the Italian Trecento: Dante's Divine Comedy and Petrarch's Canzoniere. And yet a yawning aesthetic chasm that divides them.
Mirandola's Renaissance Manifesto
Florentine philosopher, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man has been called the ‘Manifesto of the Renaissance’ – and for good reason. To fifteenth-century readers, it would have seemed titillatingly, even dangerously humanistic.
Renaissance: Birth of Modern Man
In the mid to late fifteenth century, there began to be felt, in Europe, a shift in our way of seeing the world so far-reaching in its implications, that it has since been deemed as marking the dawn of modernity. It is known by the name Renaissance, or ‘rebirth’.