The Renaissance and the rise of European consciousness

pp. 109-131

in: Gérard Delanty, Formations of European modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

The Renaissance marked the end of the medieval age and the birth of modernity. In this sense, it was a movement in historical consciousness, which defined the present in terms of its relation to the past. As an era, the Renaissance covers some of the cultural aspects of what is now more commonly referred to as the early modern period. However, it is best understood less as an era than a mood or consciousness that was variously present in Europe of the fifteenth century and which helped to shape a European consciousness. With the Renaissance, the idea of Europe emerges and when distinctively European trends become discernible. It is also when the movement towards modernity takes on a new significance and when Europe becomes entangled in the rest of the world. The Renaissance led to the emergence of a cultural identity for Europe and laid the basis for a nascent political identity. This was achieved in the following ways to be discussed in this chapter. First, it established through humanism a conception of human subjectivity and a self-questioning attitude along with new notion of authority based on science and exploration. Second, it also marked the birth of a new political imagination characterized by republicanism and which was to lay the basis for European political modernity. Third, it was the moment that saw the emergence of a new consciousness of Europe in the context of an awareness of other worlds beyond Christendom. These three moments—the humanistic and scientific worldview, the republican imagination and the encounter with the non-European world—were formative in the making of modern European identity.