Buxoro davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz adabiyotshunosligi kafedrasi

Theme 3: Renaissance in the world literature 
The Renaissance (UK /rɨˈneɪsəns/, US /ˈrɛnɨsɑːns/, French:Renaissance, 
Original Italian: Rinascimento, from rinascere "to be reborn")
was a cultural 
movement  from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle 
Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Renaissance in Italy was a period of 
expanding economic, political, and cultural activity. The towns and cities emerged 
from feudal conditions to become centers of commerce and industry. The period was 
marked by a rebirth of culture based on the discovery of ancient manuscripts and the 

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re-evaluation of classical literature and philosophy, which spread eventually 
throughout Europe.Many of the great of early Renaissance were scholars with 
philological research into and the translation of the Greek and Latin classics. They 
were called humanists because of their interest in human rather than other worldly 
ideals. Though availability of paper and the invention of metal movable type sped 
the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the 
Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe. Although the 
Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and 
political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the 
contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo, who 
inspired the term "Renaissance man".There is a consensus that the Renaissance 
began in Florence, Italy, in the 14th century. Various theories have been proposed 
to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors 
including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political 
structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; and the migration of 
Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople at the hands 
of the Ottoman Turks. It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian 
Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to 
take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization— historians of 
economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most 
particularly, natural science— but only exceptionally by students of literature and 
hardly ever by historians of Art. Some have called into question whether the 
Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a 
period of pessimism and nostalgia for the classical age, while social and economic 
historians, especially have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, 
linked , as Panofsky himself observed, "by a thousand ties” The Renaissance was 
a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early 
modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th 
century, its influence was felt in literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, 
religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed 
the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art. 
During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand. Artists depended totally 
on patrons while the patrons needed money to sustain geniuses. Wealth was brought 
to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia and 
Europe. Silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the 
Eastern world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa 
and Venice. 
Michelet defined the 16th-century Renaissance in France as a period in 
Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a 
modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The Renaissance in 
Italy was a period of expanding economic, political, and cultural activity. The towns 
and cities emerged from feudal conditions to become centers of commerce and 
industry. City leaders struggled constantly to increase their power by conquest and 
by establishing spheres of influence. Some city-states, such as Venice and Genoa, 
won control of Mediterranean empires. The period was marked by a rebirth of 
culture based on the discovery of ancient manuscripts and the reevaluation of 
classical literature and philosophy, which spread eventually throughout Europe.

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Many of the great figures of early Renaissance literature were scholars concerned 
with philological research into and the translation of the Greek and Latin classics. 
They were called humanists because of their interest in human rather than 
otherwordly ideals, as opposed to the scholars and thinkers of the Middle Ages. 
Many humanists turned for inspiration to the works of Plato in preference to those 
of his pupil Aristotle, who was the dominant influence in medieval scholarship. 
One of the most important figures of the early Renaissance was the humanist 
scholar and poet Petrarch. With him a new feeling entered Western culture. Unlike 
Dante and other medieval thinkers such as the Italian Scholastic philosopher Thomas 
Aquinas and the French philosopher Peter Abelard, Petrarch was not concerned so 
much with using the material of the ancient classical writers for his own purposes as 
with acting in the classical spirit. A great Latinist, he helped to restore classical Latin 
as a literary and scholarly language and to discredit the use of medieval Latin, which 
had served as an international medium of communication. After this period Latin 
lost currency as a spoken tongue. 
Petrarch is often referred to as the "modern man" because of his interest in 
individuality; his Vita Solitaria (1480; Solitary Life, 1924) and his De Remediis 
Utriusque Fortunae (1468; Physicke Against Fortune, 1579) are considered the first 
essays to express this new attitude. He has been called also the first Italian 
nationalist, as contrasted with Dante, who was a universalist and for whom Italy was 
a part to be fitted into an imperial whole. To Petrarch, Italy was the heir and 
successor of ancient Rome, the civilizing mission of which he glorified in his Latin 
epic Africa (critical edition, 1926), dealing with the Punic Wars between Rome and 
Carthage. He believed that the various states of Italy should be united to resume the 
mission of ancient Rome. 
Impressive as were Petrarch's contributions to classical scholarship, his greatness 
rests on his Italian lyrics. His Canzoniere (after 1327; trans. 1777)a collection of 
sonnets addressed to Laura, probably the Frenchwoman Laure de Noves, the 
counterpart of Dante's Beatrice departs from the idealized approach of the dolce stil 
nuovo. It introduced an intensity and inwardness of feeling and perception 
heretofore unknown in European poetry. 
Boccaccio, like Petrarch, was conscious of belonging to a new age. He was 
strongly influenced by Petrarch, and the two men became close friends. Boccaccio 
had a strong narrative bent, as evidenced by his prose romances Il Filocolo (circa 
1336) and L'amorosa Fiammetta (Amorous Fiammetta, c. 1343). Boccaccio's 
greatest work is his Decamerone (1353; The Decameron, 1620), a masterpiece in 
which he drew directly from life instead of from literary models. It is a collection of 
100 short stories presumed to have been told during a period of ten days by seven 
gentlemen and three ladies of Florence living in a remote country villa in which they 
had taken refuge from an epidemic of the plague. 
Unlike Petrarch, Boccaccio valued Dante highly; his last work was a biography 
and a series of lectures on the work of the great poet. Boccaccio's writings gained an 
international public and were drawn upon for plots and characters by writers in other 
countries. For example, his epic poem La Teseida (c. 1341) was used by the 14th-

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century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer as the basis for his "Knight's Tale" and by 
the 17th-century English poet John Dryden in his poem "Palamon and Arcite." 
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the first Italian writers to make literary 
use of the Tuscan dialect spoken in Florence, Siena, and other towns of north-central 
Italy, and they won for it general acceptance as the language of culture. 
French Renaissance literature is, for the purpose of this article, literature 
written in French (Middle French) from the French invasion of Italy in 1494 to 1600, 
or roughly the period from the reign of Charles VIII of France to the ascension of 
Henry IV of France to the throne. The reigns of Francis I (from 1515 to 1547) and 
his son Henry II (from 1547 to 1559) are generally considered the apex of the French 
Renaissance. After Henry II's unfortunate death in a joust, the country was ruled by 
his widow Catherine de' Medici and her sons Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III, 
and although the Renaissance continued to flourish, the French Wars of Religion 
between Huguenots and Catholics ravaged the country. 
This period saw: a proliferation of pamphlets, tracts, satires and memoirs; the 
success of short-story collections (“nouvelles”) as well as collections of oral tales 
and anecdotes (“propos and devis”); a public fascination with tragic tales from Italy 
(most notably those of Bandello); a considerable increase in the translating and 
publishing of contemporary European authors (especially Italians and Spaniards) 
compared to authors from the Middle Ages and classical antiquity; an important 
increase in the number of religious works sold (devotional books would beat out the 
“belles-lettres” as the most sold genre in France at the beginning of the seventeenth 
century); and finally, the publication of important works of moral and philosophical 
reflection. 
François Rabelais (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃.swa ʁa.blɛ]) (c. 1494 – 9 April 1553) 
was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and 
Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the 
grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs. His best known work is Gargantua and 
Pantagruel. 
Although the place or date of his birth is not reliably documented, and some 
scholars put it as early as 1483, it is probably that François Rabelais was born in 
November 1494 near Chinon, Indre-et-Loire, where his father worked as a lawyer. 
La Devinière in Seuilly, Indre-et-Loire, is the name of the estate that claims to be 
the writer's birthplace and houses a Rabelais museum. 
Rabelais was first a novice of the Franciscan order, and later a friar at Fontenay-
le-Comte, where he studied Greek and Latin, as well as science, philology, and law, 
already becoming known and respected by the humanists of his era, including 
Guillaume Budé. Harassed due to the directions of his studies, Rabelais petitioned 
Pope Clement VII and was granted permission to leave the Franciscans and enter 
the Benedictine order at Maillezais, where he was more warmly received. 

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