The Renaissance was a messy pivot, where peoples' relationship with the future changed.
They started looking backward in order to move forward. Before that, the dominant logic was rooted in the authority of tradition. Basically, "This is how it's always been done, so this is how we'll keep doing it." The idea was that the past had already figured things out. But people's relationship with the past shifted. People began entertaining the idea that, actually, maybe we could do better - that new ideas might solve problems the old ones couldn't.
For example, Petrarch didn't just have a nostalgic relationship with Cicero's works. He thought the ancients had something we'd lost, and by digging it back up, we could think more clearly. But it wasn't in deference or tradition, it was through a the lens which new consequences became possible. You see the same thing with Brunelleschi, who looked at Roman ruins and said, "Cool, now let's use this to invent perspective and change how we visualize space forever." Even Machiavelli, when interacting with the works of Livy and Tacitus, wasn't trying to restore a Roman republic, he was trying to figure out how power really works in the modern state.
The Renaissance was looking backward on the surface, but what made it revolutionary was how it looked back. It didn’t simply copy like the ancients had done since forever, it reinterpreted. That reinterpretation cracked open the door to modernity and the idea that the future didn't have to be like that past, but rather that it's a set of contingencies and possibilities.
_whiteCaps_ · 19h ago
Graeber and Wengrow argue that Kondiaronk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk#Oratory) should be well regarded in the history of the Renaissance but has been left out due to anti-indigeonous bigotry.
Riveting bleeding edge research in the humanities - we now use one term instead of another for the same thing.
IAmBroom · 20h ago
Words have meaning. For instance, the distinction between a "snob" and a "philistine" is meaningful.
Veen · 19h ago
Coming up with new ways to describe things is what scholars do. That's compounded by the fact that they rarely like the "popular" terminology for what they study — it's always more complicated and fragmented and interesting than we common folk understand. Therefore, we are invited to "change our thinking". See also the interminable witterings about what to call Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. Articles of this type are about as common in the humanities as "X considered harmful" articles are in in tech.
andsoitis · 20h ago
”This is what the Renaissance is for Palmer: an aspiration. Amidst constant danger and intrigue, the unremitting suffering of disease and premature death, and profound political instability, men and women dreamed of improving their lot on earth.”
… not only dreamed, but took constructive action to improve their lot.
greesil · 20h ago
>If you needed to do security research
>If you needed to summarise a document
>If you needed a task runner, which LLM would you use? Why?
>How have the behaviours of each one of the LLMs changed? The more detail they can provide about emergent behaviours and how it has changed across the different iterations, the better.
Basically, are you into this as much as the author is into it is his hiring signal. Mkay.
toyg · 20h ago
The Renaissance might have been a golden age in certain fields, but it was a thoroughly unpleasant era in other fields. For example, people started burning "witches" at unprecedented rates. And nobody at the time was even aware that they were in a "golden age" of any kind.
A_D_E_P_T · 20h ago
Witch-burning was really a late-16th/early-17th century thing.
It's to some extent true, if you want to really simplify things, that the Renaissance was a golden age only for Italy and the Western Med, and, as it waned, it turned into a dark age for the German-speaking lands of the HRE.
At the peak of the Renaissance, the Germans were producing Gutenberg-style printing, Dürer’s workshop, and the beginnings of a formidable university network... So it was a time of considerable progress in the arts and sciences, even there, even if that progress was soon turned to rather dark ends. (With the printing press, in a sense, directly responsible for Reformation pamphlets -- leading, thus, to the immense carnage of the 30 Years War -- and popular witch-hunting tomes like the Malleus Maleficarum.)
neom · 20h ago
Couldn't trespass on church monopolies over healing and arbitration, after all!
IAmBroom · 20h ago
I wouldn't call "treatment of 'witches'" a field, per se.
That aside, I agree it wasn't a "golden age". It was, if anything, a diversion in the flow of the river of Western history: humanism, prostestantism, perspective in drawing, and a noticeable increase in technical invention and scientific formalism truly changed the status quo permanently and markedly.
anovikov · 20h ago
Renaissance is a lot older than that. Renaissance was over by 1527, merely a decade after the 95 Theses when Protestantism was just getting started, still haven't had any cultural impact - and the rest of the things mentioned not started at all. "Scientific formalism" arguably started with Newton's "Principia Mathematica" whole 160 years later.
AnimalMuppet · 17h ago
That's oddly specific. What's your criterion for "Renaissance over", and why does it fit 1527?
I mean, if you're defining "Renaissance" as "High Renaissance only", and "over" as "sack of Rome", then yes, I suppose that fits. But the High Renaissance is only about 40 years, whereas the Renaissance is much larger.
CaffeineLD50 · 19h ago
We still have witch hunts both figuratively and literally - we assign blame to innocent parties and jail or unelect them.
And awareness is irrelevant. When I listened to the golden age of punk rock (IMHO) I didn't need to be aware of it: its self awareness changes nothing
And there was no "field" of witch hunting: but even if it is conceded to be so, what's wrong with a good witch burning and hanging now then?
Now we "cancel" or censor (or on HN down vote 'trolls') which is no different. Intolerance and demonizing just takes different forms in different ages.
andsoitis · 19h ago
> a good witch burning and hanging now then? Now we "cancel" or censor (or on HN down vote 'trolls') which is no different.
Literal physical violence and death is VERY different to getting canceled or censored.
CaffeineLD50 · 10h ago
[flagged]
tomhow · 4h ago
> But yes, Mr. Obvious, they are literally different. Touché.
You've been asked before to avoid commenting in the flamewar style on Hacker News. If you keep doing it we'll have to ban the account. Please make an effort to show you intend to use HN the way it's intended.
They started looking backward in order to move forward. Before that, the dominant logic was rooted in the authority of tradition. Basically, "This is how it's always been done, so this is how we'll keep doing it." The idea was that the past had already figured things out. But people's relationship with the past shifted. People began entertaining the idea that, actually, maybe we could do better - that new ideas might solve problems the old ones couldn't.
For example, Petrarch didn't just have a nostalgic relationship with Cicero's works. He thought the ancients had something we'd lost, and by digging it back up, we could think more clearly. But it wasn't in deference or tradition, it was through a the lens which new consequences became possible. You see the same thing with Brunelleschi, who looked at Roman ruins and said, "Cool, now let's use this to invent perspective and change how we visualize space forever." Even Machiavelli, when interacting with the works of Livy and Tacitus, wasn't trying to restore a Roman republic, he was trying to figure out how power really works in the modern state.
The Renaissance was looking backward on the surface, but what made it revolutionary was how it looked back. It didn’t simply copy like the ancients had done since forever, it reinterpreted. That reinterpretation cracked open the door to modernity and the idea that the future didn't have to be like that past, but rather that it's a set of contingencies and possibilities.
And as an associated commentary of this academic-ese paywall, this article titled "The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free" https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/08/the-truth-is-pay...
… not only dreamed, but took constructive action to improve their lot.
>If you needed to summarise a document
>If you needed a task runner, which LLM would you use? Why?
>How have the behaviours of each one of the LLMs changed? The more detail they can provide about emergent behaviours and how it has changed across the different iterations, the better.
Basically, are you into this as much as the author is into it is his hiring signal. Mkay.
It's to some extent true, if you want to really simplify things, that the Renaissance was a golden age only for Italy and the Western Med, and, as it waned, it turned into a dark age for the German-speaking lands of the HRE.
At the peak of the Renaissance, the Germans were producing Gutenberg-style printing, Dürer’s workshop, and the beginnings of a formidable university network... So it was a time of considerable progress in the arts and sciences, even there, even if that progress was soon turned to rather dark ends. (With the printing press, in a sense, directly responsible for Reformation pamphlets -- leading, thus, to the immense carnage of the 30 Years War -- and popular witch-hunting tomes like the Malleus Maleficarum.)
That aside, I agree it wasn't a "golden age". It was, if anything, a diversion in the flow of the river of Western history: humanism, prostestantism, perspective in drawing, and a noticeable increase in technical invention and scientific formalism truly changed the status quo permanently and markedly.
I mean, if you're defining "Renaissance" as "High Renaissance only", and "over" as "sack of Rome", then yes, I suppose that fits. But the High Renaissance is only about 40 years, whereas the Renaissance is much larger.
And awareness is irrelevant. When I listened to the golden age of punk rock (IMHO) I didn't need to be aware of it: its self awareness changes nothing
And there was no "field" of witch hunting: but even if it is conceded to be so, what's wrong with a good witch burning and hanging now then?
Now we "cancel" or censor (or on HN down vote 'trolls') which is no different. Intolerance and demonizing just takes different forms in different ages.
Literal physical violence and death is VERY different to getting canceled or censored.
You've been asked before to avoid commenting in the flamewar style on Hacker News. If you keep doing it we'll have to ban the account. Please make an effort to show you intend to use HN the way it's intended.