VI.The Renaissance研究生英语提高.doc

The Renaissance 欧洲概况 Changes in the conduct of warfare and the erosion of feudal institutions after 1300 created a new kind of state, administered by salaried bureaucrats and defended by paid soldiers. Though the policies of these states were governed by dynastic instead of national considerations and regional differences were accepted to a degree unimaginable today, the monarchies that emerged from this process in the later fifteenth century are the recognizable ancestors of the modern state. At approximately the same time, a new intellectual movement began in the Italian city-states and, by the end of the fifteenth century, had spread throughout Europe. Under the influence of such writers as Petrarch and Boccaccio, Italians began to reinterpret the ancient Greco-Roman past and apply the lessons of that reimagined period to their own times. In the process, they transformed virtually all of the arts and sciences, gave birth to the modern study of politics and history, and created a model for liberal arts education that persisted, with some modifications, into the early twentieth century. They changed the way in which Westerners thought, not only about human affairs, but also about the physical sciences. This movement is known as the Renaissance, and the term has been used conventionally to describe the entire age in which Western learning moved away from medieval precedents and began to lay the foundations of the modern world. New Learning The social and political transformations of the late Middle Ages were accompanied, as great changes often are, by the development of new intellectual interests. The most important of these was the Renaissance, or, as it was sometimes called, the New Learning. The word renaissance means rebirth in French. It is often applied to the entire age that marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times. Beginning in the fourteenth century, a number of scholars became interested in the Greco-Roman past. They sought to