Hello there. Welcome back to another entertaining educational PLP post. Today I’ll be talking about the Renaissance. Yep that one. The era after the Feudal Ages that pretty much challenged everything we ever knew up to that point.

So the Renaissance was pretty much a hotbed of great things like the printing press, public education, new religions, new art forms, scientific discoveries, and challenging everything we ever knew up to that point. I kid you not. So we stayed in the same groups as our Feudalism groups. Ours consisted of Ben, Gabby, and Lucy. We did not yet know about our final project (or I’m just bad at noticing things) and we started by just learning some basic information.

What the heck is a Renaissance?

we started off by recapping what had happened leading up to the Renaissance. Not very interesting stuff. Then we started with receiving a side project of sorts. A page of answers to questions that we were asked throughout the unit. We then learned about why Italy flourished during the Renaissance and also what patronage is. Patronage is basically when rich people see potential in artists and other workers and sponsor them.

Changing Ideas

We then learned about some important figures during the Renaissance in three different fields. The Artists, Scientists And Mathematicians, And the Thinkers. We learned about some important figures like Michelangelo, Copernicus and Da Vinci who revolutionized their fields of interest. We also picked someone from each field to study as part of our unknown final project. I selected Marsilio Ficino, Johannes Kepler, And Michelangelo. I researched them and then made a radical Venn Diagram Of The three.

Spreading Ideas

There wasn’t really much of a main topic for this section. Just things or people that spread ideas, like the printing press, which made education more widespread and allowed for more people to enrich themselves in knowledge, and Martin Luther. No, not Martin Luther King, just Martin Luther. He was the guy who began challenging religion and the whole indulgence idea. Pretty much, the church wanted money, so they sold indulgences, which let people sin or do something naughty without punishment. He thought that whole thing was pretty gosh darn sketchy, so he did what any normal person would do. He started his own religion. It was pretty much just a branch of Christianity, but with some differences. And that’s how Protestantism was born.

The Impact Of Ideas

The final section before the main project was the impact that those ideas had on the Renaissance. This section included Politics and this guy called Machiavelli. This guy pretty much just said that all men are greedy, conniving liars and that leaders should only be concerned with maintaining land. Again, I kid you not. Also, we learned about the English Civil war, which included Charles I, a king who dismissed Parliament for money to fight Spain. He also believed in something called the divine right of kings, which said that all kings have the power of god behind them. Oliver Cromwell was another important fellow who opposed Charles I And took over the throne after Charles died. Unfortunately, the public didn’t like him very much either. After he died, they then chose Charles I’s son as the new king. Fun fact, after Cromwell died, they dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street, because that’s what all normal people do in their spare time.

The Final Project

The final project was later revealed to be a triptych. That’s pretty much a three paneled interconnecting work of art that has one common theme. Here’s an example:

So, we had to combine all of what we had learned into this triptych. The left side was Changing Ideas, the right was the Spread Of Ideas, And the Middle was the impact of ideas. And, once again, it was centred around the western worldview and how the Renaissance impacted it. Are you sensing a common theme with these projects? Because I sure am.

So, after many minute-I mean hours… of hard labor and a lot of procrastination, I created this abomination:

I know y’all are gonna roast me for this, but I know that my animation styles are whack. My reasoning behind this is that it’s hard to find really good images on Creative Commons of people that fit your theme.

Anyways, that marks the end of this post. In hindsight, I wish I had searched harder on Flickr to find better images for my triptych. I also really regret procrastinating so much and having to stay up until 2:00 finishing my homework. Those energy drinks sure ain’t gonna help me anytime soon. Well, I’m done. That’s it. Goodbye.