英国文学史及选读chapter 5 the Renaissance.pptVIP

English Literature of the Renaissance;The Renaissance in Europe;“Modern natural science, which alone has achieved an all-round systematic and scientific development, dates, like all more recent history, from that mighty epoch which we Germans term the Reformation, … and which the French term the Renaissance and the Italians the Cinquecento… It is the epoch which had its rise in the last half of the 15th century. Royalty, with the support of the burghers of the towns, broke the power of the feudal nobility and established the great monarchies, based essentially on nationality, within which the modern European nations and modern bourgeois society came to development. ;And while the burghers and nobles were still fighting one another, the peasant war in Germany pointed prophetically to future class struggles, not only by bringing on to the stage the peasants in revolt – that was no longer anything new – but behind them the beginning of the modern proletariat, with the red flag in their hands and the demand for common ownership of goods on their lips.;In the manuscripts saved from the fall of Byzantium, in the antique statutes dug out of the ruins of Rome, a new world was revealed to the astonished West, that of ancient Greece; the ghost of the Middle Ages vanished before its shinning forms; Italy rose to an undreamt-of flowering of art, which seemed like a reflection of classical antiquity and was never attained again. ;In Italy, France and Germany a new literature arose, the first modern literature; shortly afterwards came the classical epochs of English and Spanish literature. The bounds of the old orbis terrarum were pierced. Only now for the first time was the world really discovered and the basis laid for subsequent world trade and the transition from handicraft to manufacture, which in its formed the starting point for modern large industry.;The dictatorship of the church over men’s minds was shattered; it was directly cast off by the majority of the Germanic peo