Tag: Renaissance

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Renaissance

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To finish out the school year, I put together a three-day mini-unit for my World History students to familiarize them with some of the major movements in Europe between circa 1300-1600.  The idea is to bridge the gap between the High Middle Ages (specifically, the end of The Hundred Years’ War and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453) and the Age of Exploration.  That will allow them to start United States History in August with a broad, albeit brief, sense of the context for European colonization of the New World, which is where the US History course begins (along with some history about pre-Columbian native tribes and civilizations).

My “three-day mini-unit” really worked out to be about three-and-a-half days, as I’m attempting to cover some huge changes in European society and faith.  The mini-unit covers the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation (and the Catholic Counterreformation), and European exploration and colonization (the last  of which is a very cursory introduction).

Readers should be able to access the slides here.  They primarily pull information from McDougal Littell’s World History: Patterns of Interaction (2005; that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you), supplemented in my lectures with my own insights, pulled from various sources.  I add quite a bit about the Reformation, for example, in my lectures, and we look at a good bit more Renaissance art than appears in the slides.

Indeed, the Renaissance constitutes over one-third of the slides, because it’s such a transformative movement in its own right.  Literally meaning “rebirth,” the Renaissance represented a fundamental shift in the medieval mind.  Rather than creating art and literature primarily for the glorification of God, the humanism of the Renaissance sought to better understand and to celebrate humanity itself.  The movement’s interest in classical Greece and Rome sought to move beyond mining insights into Christian theology from those pre-Christian sources, but to understand the values of the ancient Greeks and Romans on their own terms.  That represented a shift away from the Aquinian scholastic project of reconciling pre-Christian (and pagan) Greco-Roman philosophy with Christian theology and the revealed Truth of the Bible towards a more historical approach.

That said, the Renaissance was not dominated by atheists.  Indeed, Renaissance humanism was very Christian in nature.  While the emphasis of art shifted to the human, it was in a context of the human as a reflection of God; after all, we are made in His Image.  Michelangelo’s famous painting “The Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel demonstrates that God Is firmly Sovereign.  Adam reclines, his hand extended somewhat limply, while God, surrounded by a heavenly host of angels, extends forward, His Finger extended in the act of creation:

“The Creation of Adam”; Image Source: https://www.pickpik.com/sistine-chapel-vatican-michelangelo-museum-rome-143433, accessed 8 May 2026 (image is in the public domain)

Indeed, God’s entire Body is in action, almost Moving towards His Creation.  While Adam’s form is certainly idealized, he is clearly the recipient of the creative act, not the initiator.

The Catholic Church was a major sponsor of the Renaissance, sometimes to its detriment:  one source of complaints from the Protestant reformers was the extreme luxury and decadence of the popes and cardinals.  Many popes embraced the earthier sides of the Renaissance, with its celebration of good food along with good art, and engaged in all manner of sinful activities.  But God Uses even wicked men to His Ends, and in its corruption and venality the Catholic Church of the Renaissance patronized the creation of numerous devotional works of exquisite quality.  In music, for example, a Reformation-chastened papacy would shift away from the garish theatricality of late medieval sacred music and re-embrace the ethereal beauty of composers like Palestrina, whose Pope Marcellus mass is a masterpiece of choral writing.

The humanist genie was out of its bottle, however, and did much to fertilize the soil from which the Reformation would spring.

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Open Mic Adventures XXIX: “Lavender’s Blue”

The Portly Politico12 Comments

I’m diving back into Alfred’s Basic Piano Library, Complete Levels 2 & 3 for the Late Beginner this week with the piece “Lavender’s Blue.”

As I explain in the video, I knew very little about the song, other than it has a kind of Renaissance feel to it.  Since making that hasty recording during a precious planning period, I have done a bit more research on the piece.

The piece dates back to sixteenth-century England, where it was a popular folk song and nursery rhyme.  The lyrics suggest the nursery rhyme elements:

Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, lavender’s green,

When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen:

Who told you so, dilly dilly, who told you so?

‘Twas mine own heart, dilly dilly, that told me so.

Any tune with “dilly dilly” in the lyrics is prime nursery rhyming.  As is frequently the case with these very old songs, the piece has dozens have verses, and variations upon those verses, so there’s not an “official” version—kind of like Blade Runner (1982).

Fortunately, I’m just playing it on piano, so there’s no confusion there.

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The Joy of Renaissance Music: Palestrina’s “Pope Marcellus” Mass

The Portly Politico28 Comments

It’s another school year, which means another year going through the history of Western music in Pre-AP Music Appreciation.  This week we’re diving into Renaissance music, after spending last week covering the music of the Middle Ages.

Contrary to popular belief, the Middle Ages were not a period of depressing darkness, but rather a lively age.  I certainly wouldn’t want to be a peasant pushing an ox cart full of dung, but that peasant knew his place in the universe, in the sense that he knew he was part of an ordered cosmos with God at both its head and its center.

More on that another time, but I mention it to note that the Renaissance would not have been possible without that long age of faith in the Middle Ages.  Still, the Renaissance Period—variably dated, but starting roughly sometime in the fifteenth century, and extending to the seventeenth century—was a period of increased interest in the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, especially the human realism depicted in the art of those great civilizations, both a continuation of and a departure from the Middle Ages.

It also saw the declining influence of the Catholic Church in Europe, especially in the wake of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.  As Protestantism and other social forces broke the Church’s monopoly on education and its dominance over art and music, Catholicism mounted a Counter-Reformation, aimed at both reducing the influence of Protestantism and reforming real abuses within the Roman Church.

That effort, naturally, involved revisions to music.  Catholic priests denounced the increasingly theatrical nature of church music, decrying it as distracting from the simple message of the Gospel and the sacred Latin text, instead serving as gaudy entertainment for Mass goers.  Much like the megachurch arena rock concerts of today, services had become garish and maudlin, a reflection of the corruption within the Church.

It was in this context that Giovanni Pieluigi da Palestrina composed his greatest works.  According to Roger Kamien in Music: An Appreciation (the eighth brief edition, which I use with my students), Palestrina composed some 104 masses and 450 other sacred works, and his music became, essentially, the gold standard of church music until modern times (“masses” in the musical context are works built around five sung prayers, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei, not to be confused with the Catholic service).

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