Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis

Abstract

In this new survey of the development of European intellectual culture between about 1350 and 1550, Anthony Levi offers a fresh view of the Renaissance and the Reformation, calling for a reassessment of the nature of both. Through a detailed examination of the significant intellectual, spiritual, and ideological developments across Europe during this period, Levi disputes the discontinuities commonly understood to explain and defend the events we term the "Renaissance" and the "Reformation." He argues that the renewed cult of the literary, visual, and educational norms of classical antiquity were a consequence-not the essence or cause-of the Renaissance. Further, the Reformation emerged from a cultural movement that neither constituted a historical discontinuity nor led to the catastrophic religious clashes of the sixteenth century. To construct his argument Levi analyzes intellectual developments reflected in the works of Petrarch, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Thomas More, Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, and many others. In addition he considers the full sweep of issues relating to the gestation of the Renaissance and Reformation, among them the political and financial consequences of the emergence of the large nation states, their attitudes toward the papacy, the evolving relationship between sacred and secular sovereign powers, and the norms informing the development of Europe's legal systems and its religious sensibilities.