St Andrews, United Kingdom

Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Culture

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: arts
Qualification: MLitt
Kind of studies: part-time studies
Master of Letters (MLitt)
University website: andrews.ac.uk
Culture
Culture () is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Some aspects of human behavior, social practices such as culture, expressive forms such as art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies such as tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing are said to be cultural universals, found in all human societies. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
Renaissance
The Renaissance (UK: , US: ) is a period in European history, covering the span between the 14th and 17th centuries. It is an extension of the Middle Ages, and is bridged by the Age of Enlightenment to modern history. It grew in fragments, with the very first traces found seemingly in Italy, coming to cover much of Europe, for some scholars marking the beginning of the modern age.
Renaissance
The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.
André Malraux, Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951) Part IV, Chapter VI
Renaissance
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Orson Welles, as the character Harry Lime in the Graham Greene film, The Third Man (1949).
Renaissance
The men of the Renaissance were in a peculiar situation... What they saw behind them... were the peaks of classical antiquity... the summit of human reason... since lost. ...[T]hey were governed by... this ancient outlook which at one level represented a static view... and at another level... involved a theory of decadence... under a system that might be described as cyclic. This antique-modern view... found explicit statement... in the writings of Machiavelli. ...Within any city or state or civilization... the natural operation of time was to produce internal corruption... a process of decandence. [I]n a parallel manner... bodies would decompose and the finest fabrics in nature would suffer putrefaction. ...[T]he current science chimed in... for in both realms... compound bodies had a natural tendency to disintegrate. ...[A]t the Renaissance it was almost less possible to believe in what we call progress than it had been in the middle ages.
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)
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