So after learning about the Crusades, the Middle Ages and Feudalism and then writing a post about it  (Click here) we moved on to the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a period after the middle ages. It was a pretty big deal. A lot of things changed. Now, when you think Renaissance you think art right? Yeah, thats one of the most notable characteristics of the Renaissance but there are actually a whole lot more!

Let’s start with a Basic introduction

A Basic Introduction 

So what will we be focusing on about the renaissance? The minds behind it. It all starts of with the Italian City States.

The what???

The Italian City States were basically the different parts of Italy divided into these little states. These City States were the first to began to rely strongly on trade to fund their economy, they were the birth place of humanist thinkers (we’ll come back to those) and they were the first to not rely on religion to lead them.

 

Humanist thinkers and wait…what’s humanism??? 

Humanism was a way of thinking. Humanist believed in focusing one The individual instead of a God. In believing not what a book or what others told you but what you saw. Humanist thinkers deeply impacted the world because they are very much the basis of how a lot of us think. We divided the thinkers we read about into 3 different categories, that we would later use for a project, Mathematicians/Scientists, Philosophers and Artists.

Here are a notable few:

 

 

Our projects

We had to main projects this term, one that was a big deal and the other one not so much.

The small one we did was a triple Venn diagram about 3 men (unfortunately women were still not recognized that much in the renaissance) that were either a thinker (philosopher), an artist or a scientist/mathematician.

 

The big project we had to do was to create a triptych. A trip…tych…um..what?! Imagine a square frame, divided into three pieced with something that connects them, an element of some sort. That’s a triptych basically, so we had to create one. It was all about how different ideas impacted the worldviews differently. The left panel would be the change of ideas, the middle panel would be the impact of ideas and the right panel would be the spread of ideas. I, finished my first draft of the triptych but the pannels weren’t connected enough, they didn’t have an element to connect them so it was more “collage like” . So I am currently working on the second draft and this sentence will changed whence I am done.

 

My thoughts on this unit 

This unit has been lots of fun and brought on a lot of realizations. Learning about the humanist thinkers that started all of this really got me thinking, because how they thought about this is a lot like how I think about things today. Also learning about all the wacky inventions in the renaissance was pretty fun, some of those ideas were pretty wack…