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Hi, I'm John Green, This is Crash Course: World History and today we're going to talk
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about something that ought to be controversial: The Renaissance.
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So you probably already know about the Renaissance thanks to the work of noted teenage mutant
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ninja turtles Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. But that isn't the whole story.
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(Me-from-the-past:) Mr. Green, Mr. Green. What about Splinter? I think he was an architect.
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Ugh, me from the past, you're such an idiot. Splinter was a painter, sculptor, AND an architect.
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He was a quite a Renaissance rat.
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Right, so the story goes that the Renaissance saw the rebirth of European culture after
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the miserable Dark Ages, and that it ushered in the modern era of secularism, rationality,
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and individualism.
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And those are all in the list of things we like here at Crash Course.
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(Me-from-the-past:) Mr. Green. I think you're forgetting Cool Ranch Doritos?
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Yeah, fair enough.
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Then what is so controversial? Well, the whole idea of a European Renaissance presupposes
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that Europe was like an island unto itself that was briefly enlightened when the Greeks
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were ascendant and then lost its way and then rediscovered its former European glory.
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Furthermore, I'm going to argue that the Renaissance didn't even necessarily happen.
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But first, let's assume that it did. Essentially, the Renaissance was an efflorescence of arts
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(primarily visual, but also to a lesser extent literary) and ideas in Europe that coincided
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with the rediscovery of Roman and Greek culture.
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It is easiest to see this in terms of visual art, Renaissance art tends to feature a focus
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on the human form, somewhat idealized, as Roman and especially Greek art had.
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And this classicizing is also rather apparent in the architecture of the Renaissance which
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featured all sorts of Greek columns and triangular pediments and Roman arches and domes. In fact,
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looking at a Renaissance building you might even be able to fool yourself into thinking
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you're looking at an actual Greek building, if you sort of squint and ignore the fact
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that Greek buildings tend to be, you know, ruins.
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In addition to rediscovering, that is, copying Greek and Roman art, the Renaissance saw the rediscovery
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of Greek and Roman writings and their ideas.
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And that opened up a whole new world for scholars well, not a new world, actually since the texts
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were more than 1000 years old, but you know what I mean.
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The scholars who examined, translated, and commented upon these writings were called
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humanists, which can be a little bit of a confusing term, because it implies they were
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concerned with, you know, humans rather than, say, the religious world.
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Which can add to the common, but totally incorrect, assumption that Renaissance writers and artists
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and scholars were, like, secretly not religious.
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That is a favorite favorite area of speculation on the Internet and in Dan Brown novels, but
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the truth is that Renaissance artists were religious. As evidence, let me present you
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with that fact that they painted the Madonna over and over and over and over and over and
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STAN!
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Anyway, all humanism means is that these scholars studied what were called the humanities. Literature,
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philosophy, history.
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Today, of course, these areas of study are known as the so-called dark arts. What? Liberal
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arts? Aw, Stan, you're always making history less fun. I WANT TO BE A PROFESSOR OF THE
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DARK ARTS.
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Stan (Off camera): The Dark Arts job, it's a dangerous position.
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John: Yeah, I guess that is true, so we'll stick with this.
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Right so here at Crash Course, we try not to focus too much on dates, but if I'm going
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to convince you that the Renaissance didn't actually happen, I should probably tell you,
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you know, when it didn't happen. So traditionally the Renaissance is associated with the 15th
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and 16th centuries. Ish.
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The Renaissance happened all across Europe, but we're going to focus on Italy, because
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I want to and I own the video camera. Plus, Italy really spawned the Renaissance.
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What was it about Italy that lent itself to Renaissancing? Was it the wine? The olives?
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The pasta? The plumbers? The relative permissiveness when it comes to the moral lassitude of their
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leaders? Well, let's go to the Thought Bubble.
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Italy was primed for Renaissance for exactly one reason: Money.
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A society has to be super rich to support artists and elaborate building projects and
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to feed scholars who translate and comment on thousand-year-old documents. And the Italian
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city states were very wealthy for two reasons.
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First, many city states were mini-industrial powerhouses each specializing in a particular
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industrial product like Florence made cloth, Milan made arms.
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Second, the cities of Venice and Genoa got stinking rich from trade.
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Genoa turned out a fair number of top-notch sailors, like for instance Christopher Columbus.
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But the Venetians became the richest city state of all.
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As you'll remember from the Crusades, the Venetians were expert sailors, shipbuilders,
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and merchants and as you'll remember from our discussions of Indian Ocean trade, they
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also had figured out ways to trade with Islamic empires, including the biggest economic power
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in the region: the Ottomans.
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Without trading with the Islamic world, especially in pepper, Venice couldn't have afforded
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all those painters nor would they have had money to pay for the incredibly fancy clothes
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they put on to pose for their fancy portraits.
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The clothes, the paint, the painters, enough food to get a double chin all of that was
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paid for with money from trade with the Ottomans.
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I know I talk a lot about trade, but that is because it is so incredibly awesome, and it
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really does bind the world together.
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And while trade can lead to conflicts, on balance, it has been responsible for more
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peaceful contacts than violent ones because, you know, death is bad for business.
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This was certainly the case in the Eastern Mediterranean where the periods of trade-based
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diplomacy were longer and more frequent than periods of war, even though all we ever talk
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about is war because it is very dramatic, which is why my brother Hank's favorite video
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game is called Assassin's Creed, not Some Venetian Guys Negotiate A Trade Treaty.
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Thanks, Thought Bubble. So here's another example of non-Europeans supporting the Renaissance:
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The Venetians exported textiles to the Ottomans.
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They were usually woven in other cities like Florence, and the reason Florentine textiles
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were so valuable is because their color remained vibrant.
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That is because they were dyed with a chemical called alum, which was primarily found in
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Anatolia, in the Ottoman Empire.
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So to make the textiles the Ottomans craved, the Italians needed Ottoman alum, at least
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until 1460.
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When Giovanni da Castro, Pope Pius Ilis' godson, discovered alum, in Italy, in Tolfa.
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And he wrote to his godfather, the Pope: ''Today I bring you victory over the Turk. Every year
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they wring from the Christians more than 300,000 ducats for the alum with which we dye wool
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various colors... But I have found seven mountains so rich in this material that they could supply
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seven worlds. If you will give orders to engage workmen, build furnaces, and melt the ore,
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you will provide all Europe with alum and the Turk will lose all his profits. Instead
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they will accrue to you."
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So the Pope was like, "Heck yeah." More importantly he granted a monopoly on the mining
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rights of alum to a particular Florentine family, the Medicis.
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You know, the ones you always see painted.
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But vitally, Italian alum mines didn't bring victory over the Turks, or cause them to lose
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all their profits, just as mining and drilling at home never alleviate the need for trade.
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Okay, one last way contact with Islam helped to create the European Renaissance, if indeed
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it happened: The Muslim world was the source of many of the writings that Renaissance scholars
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studied.
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For centuries, Muslim scholars had been working their way through ancient Greek writings,
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especially Ptolemy and Aristotle, who despite being consistently wrong about everything
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managed to be the jumping off point for thinking both in the Christian and Muslim worlds.
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And the fall of Constantinople in 1453 helped further spread Greek ideas because Byzantine
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scholars fled for Italy, taking their books with them. So we have the Ottomans to thank
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for that, too.
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And even after it had become a Muslim capital, Istanbul was still, like, the number one destination
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for book nerds searching for ancient Greek texts.
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Plus, if we stretch our definition of Renaissance thought to include scientific thought, there
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is a definite case to be made that Muslim scholars influenced Copernicus, arguably the
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Renaissance's greatest mind.
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Oh, it's time for the open letter? An Open Letter to Copernicus.
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But first, let's see what is in the secret compartment today. Wow, the heliocentric solar
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system? Cool. Earth in the middle, sun in the middle, earth in the middle, sun in the
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middle. Ptolemy. Copernicus. Ptolemy. Copernicus.
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Right, an open letter to Copernicus.
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Dear Copernicus,
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Why you always gotta make the rest of us look so bad?
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You were both a lawyer and a doctor? That doesn't seem fair.
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You spoke four languages and discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe,
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come on.
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But at least you didn't discover it entirely on your own. Now, there's no way to be sure
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that you had access to Muslim scholarship on this topic.
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But one of your diagrams is so similar to a proof found in an Islamic mathematics treatise
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that it is almost impossible that you didn't have access to it.
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Even the letters on the diagram are almost the same. So at least I can tell my mom that
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when she asks why I'm not a doctor and a lawyer and the guy who discovered the heliocentric
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solar system.
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Best wishes, John Green
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Alright, so now having spent the last several minutes telling you why the Renaissance happened
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in Italy and not in, I don't know, like India or Russia or whatever, I'm going to argue
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that the Renaissance did not in fact happen.
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Let's start with the problem of time. The Renaissance isn't like the Battle of Hastings
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or the French Revolution where people were aware that they were living amid history.
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Like, when I was eleven and most of you didn't exist yet, my dad made my brother and me turn
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off the Cosby Show and watch people climbing on the Berlin Wall so we could see history.
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But no one, like, woke their kids up in Tuscan village in 1512 like, ''Mario, Luigi, come
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outside! The Renaissance is here!
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Hurry, we're living in a glorious new era, where man's relationship to learning is changing.
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I somehow feel a new sense of individualism based on my capacity for reason."
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No. In fact, most people in Europe were totally unaware of the Renaissance, because its art
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and learning affected a tiny sliver of the European population.
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Like, life expectancy in many areas of Europe actually went down during the Renaissance.
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Art and learning of the Renaissance didn't filter down to most people the way that technology
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does today.
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And really the Renaissance was only experienced by the richest of the rich and those people,
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like painters, who served them.
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I mean, there were some commercial opportunities, like for framing paintings or binding books,
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but the vast majority of Europeans still lived on farms either as free peasants or tenants.
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And the rediscovery of Aristotle didn't in any way change their lives, which were governed
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by the rising and setting of the sun, and, intellectually, by the Catholic Church.
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In fact, probably about 95% of Europeans never encountered the Renaissance's opulence or
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art or modes of thought.
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We have constructed the Renaissance as important not because it was so central to the 15th
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century. I mean, at the time Europe wasn't the world's leader in, anything other than
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the tiny business of Atlantic trade.
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We remember it as important because it matters to us now. It gave us the ninja turtles.
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We care about Aristotle and individualism and the Mona Lisa and the possibility that
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Michelangelo painted an anatomically correct brain onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
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because these things give us a narrative that makes sense.
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Europe was enlightened, and then it was unenlightened, and then it was re-enlightened, and ever since
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it's been the center of art and commerce and history.
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You see that cycle of life, death, and rebirth a lot in historical recollection, but it just
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isn't accurate.
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So it's true that many of the ideas introduced to Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries became
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very important.
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But remember, when we talk about the Renaissance, we're talking about hundreds of years. I
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mean, although they share ninja turtledom, Donatello and Raphael were born 97 years apart.
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And the Renaissance humanist Petrarch was born in 1304, 229 years before the Renaissance
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humanist Montaigne.
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That is almost as long as the United States has existed. So was the Renaissance a thing?
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Not really. It was a lot of mutually interdependent things that occurred over centuries. Stupid
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truth always resisting simplicity. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.