Hello friends and welcome, as I channel my inner Jim Nantz to write this blog post. (After watching The Masters, I had to. Sorry)

This blog post will be detailing our interesting unit about, you guessed it, the Renaissance. During this unit we looked at the time period of the Renaissance. This space of time was a major development of human knowledge. There was new groundbreaking ideas and theories in multiple topics including science and math, engineering and architecture and humanism.

My previous blog post entails feudalism at its finest. Read about that here. Where we pick up now is basically the time period after.

We started by learning the definition of Renaissance. Renaissance means an awakening or rebirthing. I think the definition makes a lot of sense because there was a lot of reawakening of ideas in the Renaissance. Some people think it was the most progressive period of time for humans, which means we evolved the most and got way more smarter in that time period.

The Renaissance started in Italy. Or, to be more specific, the city states that were positioned in modern day Italy such as Florence, Venice and Milan. These city states flourished because of four main reasons. For one, geography. All of these cities were located in a good place for trade and such. Secondly, climate. It stayed relatively warm throughout the year there, making it enjoyable to live there. Thirdly, government. There wasn’t much conflict as to who should lead or make decisions. And lastly, social gatherings. Most of the “nobles” and the wealthy lived in these cities, making it desirable to live there.

We then looked at something called patronage. Patronage was used a lot in the Renaissance with artists. People would sponsor artists and then their art could be shown and sold to lots of people. An important example of this was with the Medici family. During the Renaissance they were some of the most influential and rich people. They used their money to help the arts grow and flourish. They helped a lot of people in the arts and that is why they are recognized today.

After that, we started looking at the changing of ideas. We studied 3 different categories and looked at how their ideas are still with us today. Here’s what I said for each one:

The thinkers:

To summarize, I said that the idea that still holds true today was that if you put your mind to it, you can achieve great things.

The artists:

To summarize what I said here, art is constantly evolving and artists are always developing new and imaginative ideas.

The mathematicians and scientists:

What I basically said here was that one idea from the Renaissance that we still have today is the scientific method along with a few other ideas.

After we finished that, we looked at the spread of ideas in the Renaissance. Good ideas tend to spread and the Renaissance was no exception to that rule.

One groundbreaking piece of technology invented during the Renaissance was the printing press. It revolutionized learning in the 15th century. Before this piece of technology, books were incredibly hard to come by and people that didn’t have as much rights as others probably never saw a book in their life. When the machine was invented, it was so much easier for people to get their hands on books. It made it much easier to learn about new things because the printing press made copies of books much faster than any human could.

We also looked at religion during Renaissance times. Originally, there was just one religion, Christianity. During the Renaissance, there were multiple branches of Christianity created including Protestant and Anglican.

During these times, people began to get more and more frustrated with the church. The main reason for that is because each person paid a lot of money to the church and the church was using it only for the priests. That meant the people in the church had more food and essentials than everyone else. As you could probably tell, this didn’t make anyone too happy. What happened then was a new religion breaking off that had the people that were frustrated with the Catholics in it.

After that, we looked at the impact of ideas on Renaissance Europe.

I think that during the course of this time period, people began to feel more in control and happy with their lives. Having access to new technology would be a privilege that more and more people were getting access to and it probably felt pretty good. With everyone feeling this way, it would be a pretty big change for a country.

I think for those reasons, there was a massive civil war in England in the 1600’s. The entire country debated on who should be king for many years.

Lastly, the final project.

We had to do lots of work to make this come together. The end goal was to make a triptych about Renaissance Europe. A triptych is basically a picture with three parts to it.

Firstly, we talked about the spread of ideas. For this portion, we had to make a cause effect blossom. Here’s what mine looked like:

 

 

We then had to make a vent dig ran showing how specific people affected the spread of ideas. Here’s mine:

Lastly, we had to make an idea organizer for the impact of ideas. Here’s mine:

We then had to put these ideas together, but it couldn’t have any words. It was hard to put it together and express everything I wrote down. Here’s what mine looked like in the end.

What I was trying to express on the left side was some of the most famous people in the Renaissance times and their great inventions. This was the changing of ideas.

On the right was the spread of ideas. I put a tunnel with the light at the end of it to symbolize people in the Renaissance finally getting what they deserve and “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel”.

In the middle was the impact of ideas. I put the crown to symbolize the changing of kings. The picture of the church represents the church splitting.

I think, in the end, this was a fun and intriguing unit. This pretty much wraps up this blog post and I hope you enjoyed reading!

See you next time,

Nik