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Hi, welcome to Pods with Nick and James, a podcast where two friends just discuss different intellectual topics
as we just have a little bit of a, you know, dip our toes into the ocean of knowledge that we all have at our fingertips nowadays.
Today's topic is going to be one that's kind of always interested me on a number of levels,
partly in its ambiguity and partly just in the way that it's collected together and put into the group.
The topic this week is the Renaissance or Renaissance if you're American.
It depends. Yeah, depends how you want to pronounce it, if I'm honest with you.
My main sources for this topic was some of the videos on Crash Court by John Green,
as well as the Stephen Fry documentary on Johann Gottensberg's creation of the European printing press,
as well as the Renaissance, a very short introduction by the Oxford University Press by Jerry Broughton.
Nick, I know you've had a number of different sources. I should have said hello earlier. How are you doing today?
I'm good. Thank you very much. Yeah.
The intention on this podcast was that we would both look into the same source. So we were both going to look at a brief history
or whatever it was called of the Renaissance by Jerry Broughton, was it?
Yeah, that's how it's pronounced. I think that's how it's pronounced.
No worries. But unfortunately, my copy of the audiobook failed halfway through and as such, I decided to dip into other sources,
namely the Britannica, Quora, other places such as that, Geeks for Geeks, online encyclopedias and forums,
which is where I normally get my resources from.
It should give a nice couple of different angles to the discussion.
No, that's fair enough. That's fair enough. Well, I guess we'll start with the basic thing, Nick.
What do you believe? Like, because there's lots of different...
Once again, because the Renaissance was a cultural phenomenon, what are your views on what constitutes as the Renaissance?
The Renaissance in historical terms was the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern thinking of man. I suppose the best way to really describe the Renaissance is actually to define humanity in the Middle Ages.
Okay. All right. No, that's a fair point. So to kind of put it in context.
Yeah. So a human being, a human person, if they were previous to the Renaissance, they belonged to a church, they were heavily religious,
and they thought of themselves as that member of that church. And if they were a worker, they would normally belong to a branch of work or a guild, for example, the Blacksmiths Guild or the Woodcutters Guild.
The Bankers Guild. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So it was about ownership, I suppose. Each individual was not an individual. They were a part of an ownership in the Middle Ages, not to mention the fact that it was very secular, war-driven, oppressed, violent times.
Yeah. Also, one thing that you touched upon briefly there is it was about ownership, but it was also nationalism was massive. So you're absolutely right. The individual, as we understand it, it seems to suggest almost didn't exist.
Like you were, well, I'm a Catholic. Well, okay, that's fine. What are you? I'm an Englishman. All right. Fine. What are you? I'm a woodcutter. Exactly. And that's what the Middle Ages was.
Sorry, I'm a bit of a dry throat. And that's not what we always were, which is kind of what the Renaissance was looking at, because previous to the Middle Ages, there was more of this individuality in Greece and in Rome, particularly with people like Plato and Aristotle.
Their kind of teachings, it was almost like that was lost in the Middle Ages with all the war that was going on. All of that independent thinking, that philosophy was lost. And the Renaissance was the renewing of it. It wasn't like a rebirth. Well, I suppose it was a rebirth. It wasn't the birth of the modern man. It was more like the renewal or the rebirth of an individual.
You are absolutely correct. I'm pretty sure that's what the word means. I should have pulled up the Oxford. Yeah, actually, I didn't mean to make that segue. I didn't mean to make that segue.
No, no, no, no, that's a very, very good point. Because
we should have prepared this beforehand.
Okay, so yeah, it's seen as a revival or a renewed interest in something.
It also comes under resurrection or reawakening. I find that they go a little bit
far in my mind in that it is the refinding of the self is something that was heavily pointed to in Jeremy Broughton's book. For me,
although it is that kind of discovery of humanism, which we'll go into in a moment,
for me, it's a movement of
okay, so for me, it is financial, technological,
cultural, and then ideological in that order for me.
But maybe I'm being a bit too
compartmentalizing it too much. But for me, that's kind of like how it seems to have gone.
So in my mind, you had the Crusades.
And then rather than killing the Ottoman and Turks,
the Venetian cities started trading with them. And things over the next couple of hundred years seems to have gotten a lot better.
And that for me is a broad, a very broad, but also a very reductive kind of history of the Renaissance, not going into the individual
amazing accomplishments of people of that time, which I'm hoping we'll step into.
I guess.
All right, you know what, just some really basic things.
What do you feel was the most important element or the most okay, you know what, we'll do element, person, and then favorite person, if that's okay with you.
What was your favorite element of the Renaissance?
I think my favorite element of the Renaissance was the change in the art.
It went from quite broad.
It became the main focal point of most art in the Renaissance was on the human form.
And it became a lot more realistic, should we say, in the way that they were drawing and very emotive.
And there was, I mean, some of the art was so deep in the layers of meaning in the art was, it was so clever.
And previous to that, you didn't really have that level of depth.
You have the symbology.
Yeah.
So like you had, it was, I almost hate to say it because I like Byzantine art in and of itself.
So that you know what, no, okay, no, the art is a good thing and that was.
Yeah, that is one of my favorite elements as well.
The movement from traditional, almost ritualistic symbolism to the representation of the real form as it appears in the human eye is one of the, I think, one of the best things that happened during the Renaissance.
And conversely is one of the worst things that happened to art after the Renaissance with the Baroque movement, which then started to exaggerate things as a way of trying to overcome that.
Do you, since you've said art, what is your favorite example of Renaissance art?
I mean, I'm, the joys of being me is that I don't really have, it's only looking into the subject that's really got me into art.
Actually, I, that's a lie.
I went through the Vatican City.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I visited the Vatican City whilst I was in Rome.
And I think, if I'm honest, the Sistine Chapel, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the story behind it as well.
You've seen it.
Yeah, the story behind it as well.
Did you know that when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, he couldn't paint.
He'd never painted before in his life.
He was a mathematician.
This is the thing that really annoys me.
Like, so, okay, so you know how, like, you look back in time to ancient Greece and everyone's a natural philosopher.
It seems to be there's another term in the Renaissance, they just call everyone a polymath.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's the thing.
Which means they did maths and other stuff.
Yeah, and to be fair, Michelangelo did everything.
But his, I suppose his greatest art was that of the Sistine Chapel.
There's no higher praise when you're not even an artist than being asked by the Pope to paint your ceiling.
And as I said, like, he couldn't paint.
So in order to get around the fact that he couldn't paint, do you know how he managed it?
Did he copy?
No, he started his painting the furthest point away from where the Pope stood as he could in hopes that by the time he reached the point where the Pope stood, it'd be all right.
And the Pope would never notice.
That's amazing.
And to be fair, very, very human.
How a man doesn't know how to paint and yet paints the human form so perfectly in the way that he did in that amazing tapestry on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
I have no idea.
And he's upside down.
Yeah, yeah, I heard he did literally lay on scaffolding whilst he painted it.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so much of his Raphaels, there's a lot of Raphaels art in the Vatican as well.
A lot of sculptures from around that time.
And of course, the dome of the Basilica to San Pietro.
The Church of St. Peter.
I really like, so out of Michelangelo's, I have to say his statue of David is my favourite.
And my reason for that is the fact that he took, so with his statue of David, he's made the head and shoulders bigger than they actually are on a human person.
And the reason why he's done that is to make the form appear perfect from the average standing position.
So he's taken the form and then he's done an additional perspective trick with the form to make it look even better.
You could argue that it's actually the first example of Baroque.
And even though I've said that I dislike that movement, this is kind of like the exception almost that proves the rule that I do like the fact that he was able to do that.
The simplest examples of you get of this sort of thing nowadays when you get those adverts on football pitches, where they've been sprayed to kind of like work with the perspective so that the people in the opposite stand can see things perfectly.
Yeah. It's actually from the perspective of the cameras for the TV.
Oh, right, yeah.
They're always painted so that the cameras on the TV look like they're standing billboards.
But they're not.
Yeah.
Yeah. Interestingly, did you know, like, I don't know if you've noticed this about Renaissance sculptures, but they always sculpted the male package extremely small.
Do you know why that was?
I imagine it was to make us all feel better about ourselves.
We had nothing to do with it.
It was seen as a sign of intellect.
If you had a small penis, it was because you were smarter.
You didn't need you didn't need a big penis if you were smart.
Apparently.
All right. I'll try to try using that one on the ladies.
See if that works.
Right. Okay. Well, I did. Okay.
Did not didn't.
Although I guess that does kind of fit with a lot of.
Kind of Greek thinking.
For example, the ancient Greeks thought that the prime of your life wasn't when you were like 30 or under the prime of your life was when you were 60.
Because you still had enough strength to do most things and the experience to do them well.
You weren't governed by your base desires at that stage.
You had evolved and were about as smart as you were going to get.
There's still hope for me.
Well, I am.
Okay. Well, yeah, that was one of the art of the Renaissance is incredibly fantastic, which is why all of the characters and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are named after those Renaissance masters.
Weird enough Splinter before anyone says it turns out was an architect.
I didn't know.
He also did lots of other stuff like a lot of people in the Renaissance.
I do find it interesting that nowadays we've got these very defined specialisms, whereas it seems people in history.
They invented the specialisms by doing everything absolutely and then doing one thing amazingly well.
So it kind of really to me just undermines that.
Yeah, because I was a lot of conversation with the tour guide in the Vatican.
I was like that Michelangelo painted, but you say he was a mathematician, but then he also did architects architecture as well.
Like, what was he? And she was like, well, he was Michelangelo.
And I was I was like, okay, fair enough.
You know, but he wasn't the only person that was like that.
He he he was one of the greatest like that, but he certainly wasn't one of the he wasn't the only person that that would paint and sculpt and do all this other stuff.
And nowadays, I suppose we are just into boxes in order to conform in our little place in reality.
And that that restricts our ability to try other things and endeavour to grow in many different ways and and become a great person, not necessarily a good person,
but a great person, given the depth of skill that you might end up with.
Well, that does seem to be a lot of people. I realize, you know, what people became famous and they'd always become famous for a reason.
So one of the favorite things, one of my favorite things about the Renaissance is is that at the time there wasn't the modern understanding of the divide between East and West or like there was there was still
both rivalry and conflict between Islam and Christianity.
But at the times when there were trade, like there wasn't a there wasn't a need to view one history as one history and one history as another.
And like, so when you talk about the Renaissance, people think that it's something that just happened only in Europe and that it didn't kind of sweep anywhere else.
And although a lot of the movements, like a lot of the intellectual movements were in part
between Europe and Western Europe, like one of the biggest things that kind of started the Renaissance was in fact the victory of the Ottoman Turks against Constantinople,
therefore dividing the dividing church and state, which I don't know, it's one of my favorite.
It's one of my favorite dates in history, it's one of my favorite kind of events in history as I don't as although I am very religious myself, I also don't believe it should be a dead hierarchical structure.
You know, yeah, because if you if you put too much structures on anything, then you kill it. And that I guess that's one of the things reasons why I see the fall of Constantinople in many ways as as a good thing.
My favorite thing. I guess my favorite thing about the Renaissance is the movement of ideas. The fact that you had so many new ideas.
Well, you had the you had the people rediscovering the texts of Plato and Aristotle after forgetting about them for several hundred years.
Yeah, thank you libraries in Baghdad and the Ottoman Empire in the whole on the whole for looking after those texts and then selling them back to us.
That's genuinely an amazing thing.
Again, also the the dyes used in the paintings and in the tapestries and stuff during the Renaissance period were all bought.
I'm an empire through the Ottoman Empire and it's just it's weird that that wasn't ever something I was taught in school.
I also find it interesting because going on to when we were talking about the Communist Manifesto, the Renaissance for me seems to be the start of modern day capitalism and seems to also be the rise of the bourgeoisie class as a whole.
Yeah, but that's a darker age to it. Yeah, so sorry. My favorite thing is the change of ideas.
Did you who do you think? I don't know.
Okay, who do you think was the most important?
You know, I realized I've made a mistake in this podcast. I should have given more of an overview earlier, but that's fine. The whole point of this is the conversation.
Who do you think contributed the most to the Renaissance?
Like, who do you think?
Yeah, who do you think defines that age the most?
I think reading about him, I would probably say Martin Luther.
Interesting.
Just because of the work that he did. I mean, he dabbled in a bit of everything. He learned a bit of law and then he learned a bit of what became a friar, didn't he? And then he kind of went, I think the church needs to look at things a bit differently.
And he wrote the 95 Thesis.
Yeah.
And I think originally he wrote it as a kind of if I was in power, I would do this. But eventually he hypothetically nailed it to the front of a church or an abbey. I can't remember particularly. And it is hypothetical. I don't know that there was actually.
That is how religious debates and stuff happened in those days.
Yeah, yeah. So you just kind of like forced it into the faces of the church and when this is what you need to be looking at. And then became by proxy a Protestant.
And the first Protestant, I suppose you could say. And that in turn gave an angle for Henry VIII when eventually he moved to protestation away from the Roman Catholic Church in order for him to divorce Anne.
Catherine of Aragon.
Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. That was the one. I knew it was one of those two ways. Interestingly, something else that I picked up on, the beginning of that audio book, the brief introduction to Renaissance, it goes on about, it talks about Hans Holbein's, I can't remember what the painting is called.
The Ambassadors.
I had to listen to it again to get that bit down.
Yeah, so Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, which is in the British.
National Gallery.
I'm going to go find it.
Yeah, yeah. So Hans Holbein, he actually painted the human form throughout the Renaissance.
And he painted the picture of Anne of Cleve that Henry VIII saw that made him want to marry her.
Interesting. Isn't Anne of Cleves the one that outlived him?
Anne of Cleves is the one that he married and then immediately divorced because she wasn't as pretty as he thought he was. He thought she would be.
But she did become one of his, like she was still important in court.
Absolutely, yeah.
Anne Boleyn got killed and got called loads of things. Catherine of Aragorn had to kind of disappear in shame. Anne of Cleves is interesting because she had so much political clout that the king, rather than shame her, he just literally renamed her my beloved sister.
Yeah, she became the king's sister. And she was given a castle in Richmond and a load of land and a load of gold.
She did actually do very well. She did really well. She was married to him from January to July, I believe, of the same year.
Oh my God.
And then it was annulled as unconsumated. And yeah, but interestingly, as I said, there's a really famous picture of Henry VIII that mostly comes up when you search for Henry VIII. That was painted by Hans Holbein.
Really?
Yeah.
The one of him where he's a little bit chunky and he's got the hat?
Yeah. That was painted by Hans Holbein.
All right, interesting.
Yeah, when I heard Hans Holbein in that beginning, I was like, wait a minute, that's that guy. And he did this and then there's that guy and he did this.
And I was like, wait a minute, it's all coming together now. So basically, Henry VIII was our first Renaissance king, I suppose you would say. He brought the Renaissance to England.
That's true. He did bring a lot of things. Although humanism had been around for quite a while, it's just it took a little while longer to reach England.
Yeah, we quite like being subservient.
Also, just really quickly to throw out there, a bit of information, although I was incredibly ignorant of this, Aragon was a large kingdom in which about half of it was in France, in modern day France, I should say, and half of it was in modern day Spain.
And it was absolutely, you know, it was sizable. It was not on a global scale, but it was sizable in that it was about as big as England.
It wasn't a small like little sliver of Spain and a small little sliver of France. It was a massive kingdom.
Although, in order to get to England, anyone going from the kingdom of Aragon would need to travel through some of France, they don't even need to travel through a little bit of it to kind of get to the right shore or they could sail all the way around Spain, but it's, I don't know, because I've never heard of it.
I didn't think it was a big deal, but then I saw it on a map and it was just like, okay, that's actually, yeah, that's a.
It's one of those things is ignorance, but it's like, it's not.
Intentionally ignorance, you hear the name Catherine of Aragon and you're like, oh, that's just her name, you know, and then eventually you see on a map, you're like, wait a minute, that makes more sense than just being her name.
It also makes sense why King Henry wanted them, wanted them as a Protestant nation covering his back.
Yeah.
I mean she, Catherine of Aragon was heavily Catholic.
She was devout Catholic, she actually retreated to an nunnery after being divorced.
Not that.
I do like that at least Catholicism does have sanctuaries.
But that's a whole other conversation for another time.
Okay, so yeah, King Henry VIII I guess was our first Renaissance King.
What I like.
What do you think of the Medici family as a whole?
Did you come across them much like I realized that they're used a lot in pop culture and stuff as well.
Yeah, I've heard the name quite a lot.
What relevance they have, I couldn't tell you.
Okay.
They're a very, okay so in ancient Rome, a number of families which ended up buying for the seat of emperor were originally olive oil like franchises.
With the Medici's they vied for several thrones and the Pope, the seat of the Pope.
And they succeeded several times in several different countries and getting the seat on the top of the church.
And they did that because they were originally a banking family.
And again, this is I guess one of my problems with not with organized religion but when it becomes too organized, too institutionalized and you can buy your way to the top.
You know, like that's just one of those things but the Medici family were hugely influential.
And it was kind of almost a sign of the Renaissance was this mercy and tile or this ability to use trade and just wealth to achieve greatness.
Yeah.
I mean some of the best produce of the Mediterranean now is sold under the name Medici.
Yeah, because it's got those old ties with kind of greatness or with kind of like skilled trading.
Yeah, I knew I could I knew I'd heard the name in the modern day and both modern and historical.
I know the names come up in historical texts I've been reading but I also know that I've read it in like modern day.
Or maybe it was on a cooking program or something like that where they bloated about it being Medici or whatever.
I can't remember.
Okay, so yeah, as you said Martin Luther was in your mind the most influential.
I believe he did put stuff.
He put stuff out there though, which was already in people's minds.
And yeah, like I think he did have a huge effect in that he kind of stood up and pointed out some of the obvious kind of flaws with the Catholic Church at the time.
Yeah, I've got a quote.
He wasn't perfect himself, but he did do well.
I've got a quote from his 95 Thesis.
Exactly on that line it says why does not the Pope whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus build the Basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers.
Yep.
And it's a fair question and that's why he caused yet another schism.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's not like I don't think he asked the question aggressively in a way that was like you should be doing X, Y, Z.
I think he kind of just said like come on man you've got enough money.
Why are you not doing this yourself?
Like you are a leader therefore be the leader like do unto others as you would have done unto yourself kind of stuff.
Yeah, be the change you want to see in the universe using modern day terminology.
Yeah.
For me there was a...
Okay, so I see.
One of the most influential people was Nicholas Copernicus.
Who was a Polish astronomer.
Yep.
And what he did was he started...
He got rid of something well...
He didn't disprove it Galileo disproved it.
But all of the original all of the concepts that were set about by or that were proved by Galileo were first brought about by Nicholas Copernicus.
Copernicus, yeah.
Yeah Copernicus, sorry.
And it's interesting because you know how you said about how people did loads of different things.
Yeah.
Copernicus was both a lawyer and a doctor and an astronomer and also a philosopher of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean to be fair.
And it's just like...
If you...
Okay, all right.
You can just stick with one impressive career.
You had to, you know, get all of them.
But what he came up with was really important to me at least in that he started the journey from believing in geocentrism which was a fallacy brought about by...
I think it was either Aristotle or Plato.
Which was the Earth is the center of the...
Center of the universe.
Yeah.
Because why wouldn't it be?
Yeah, absolutely.
And then it was also kind of the idea that beyond the moon, everything else in the sky was metaphysical and insubstantial rather than just very far away.
Yeah.
And so he brought about heliocentrism which was believing that the sun is the center of the universe but that's wrong but at least believing that it's the center of the solar system and that the Earth travels around the sun.
It also interests me.
I'm still waiting for a lot of humans to catch up with heliocentrism.
Yeah.
They are not the center of the universe.
The sun is the center of the solar system.
That is definitely the sun and you should get on with your own lives because you are in the grand scheme of things inconsequential but you are only consequential to yourself.
Yeah, that's it.
But he was... I see him as one of the major things.
What really does kind of... I guess what kind of frustrates me is the... about the Renaissance or at least one of the things that frustrates me about the Renaissance is some of the unfairness.
Not just the fact that it's when colonialism really kind of started and took off which I also found ridiculous because there were a number of books which were instructing people on how to do good business and a number of the books simply pointed out that if you follow the things in the Bible
like love your neighbor or if you try and do good to people who are poorer than you, you won't gain financially from that so you shouldn't do it.
And it's interesting to me that you had writers writing that and advising kings and they weren't touched because of their high positions.
Yep.
Yet the moment somebody didn't have that clout or that high position or that influential family, that's when they were persecuted.
And that's that to me kind of really... yeah, that annoys me just the fact that money bought you safety.
That still kind of just frustrates me.
I suppose a good point to segue into the teachings of the Renaissance and how that kind of changed.
Yeah, sure.
The difference between the Renaissance and I suppose Middle Ages was that in the Middle Ages you kind of learned your trade and you stuck at that. You became part of a guild, etc.
And in the Renaissance they had two kind of core teaching umbrellas, should we say? They called them the Trivium and the Quadrivium?
Yes.
The Trivium was like their most important and the Quadrivium was not necessarily less important, not necessarily less important, but it was secondary, should we say, to the Trivium.
The Trivium is the teachings of grammar, the teachings of logic and the teachings of rhetoric. And to put that in layman terms, it's the art of using word, then the logic of thinking and or the art of thinking, and then rhetoric is the art of communicating your thinking in words that makes sense to other people.
Quadrivium is the arts of number and quantity, so that's the teaching of arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, things like that.
No, that's a good point. I know that that was, it interests me as well that rhetoric was seen as so important.
Another thing, you know what, I should have researched more the people that I don't like and kind of said why I don't see their contribution to the Renaissance as a good thing.
The types of people that I didn't like in the Renaissance were the people who said or the people who were so versed in rhetoric that they could make anything true by talking.
Yeah, so basically the media, the propaganda of today.
The very first spin doctors, and they would write these books to prove how good they were at rhetoric and send them off to kings, quite often multiple kings, as a way of saying, look, let me in your court, I can make any decision you make just and legitimate.
Yeah, seem like the best thing in the world.
Exactly. And it's just like, I realize you want everyone wants a place at courts and stuff but you're just you're enabling somebody who's already been way too enabled.
Yeah.
And I like when I heard about you know, when I heard about several of these people who wrote these books sent them off to both the King of Spain and the King of England, and weirdly enough to Henry the eighth to say look we can make.
You can do whatever you want and I'll take care of the details.
That just wasn't fantastic.
I think also the idea that I don't like that came about in the Renaissance was the idea. It seems to be the birthplace of.
We have rediscovered.
Aristotle, we have found out what is profitable.
Therefore, we are better than everyone else it's when like Europe as a power started to come into its own thing.
And immediately, almost immediately.
The people in power started trying to figure out how to carve up the rest of the world. Yeah, and lay claim to things that weren't weren't theirs.
Yeah, you know, we pre pre Renaissance people would not have called themselves re European.
And that's it. However, post Renaissance, it was pretty normal, be European, you know, as a as a sect.
And anything that wasn't European was seen as lower base.
Until the New World.
Or see it was Columbus is was it Columbus that went to the New World.
So Columbus went to Columbus went to America.
There was another bloke who went and did it called John.
K bot who, weird enough, did it under the patronage of King Henry the seventh.
Interesting thing about him. His name was actually Giovanni K bots.
And he literally.
Really weirdly the whole reason why he went on this voyage to try and go find another way to get to India and get the get spices get all of dyes get all of the good stuff.
Was because he was running away from debtors.
And it almost like says it all he literally ran out of Florence in the city states and went to England and sought patronage there because he'd rung up loads of debts in his home country.
And it's just.
Yeah, but sorry. Yeah, Columbus.
Columbus is renowned for finding America.
My I kind of actually went knowing it was there.
There are there are maps from yeah, like the Perry Reese map where it is quite clearly.
On this map. I also love that another thing that they don't teach you in history class is although you know we had some maps and there were some classical maps from ancient Greek and stuff.
It was the astrologers and it was both Jewish and Arabic navigators.
Yeah.
Who helped who helped in this in this European expansion. And I'm sorry I'm not saying like are who helped as in like they were they were.
They were instruments that came with it. Yeah, it was their know how it was their instruments and their knowledge which enabled that at school like why is why are the where do you live.
All right, fair. Yeah, yeah, I'm just to clarify that point. Or I live in England listeners. Exactly, because we live. I mean, if you live in America, you're taught, you're taught the American perspective you live in England, you're taught the English perspective or the United Kingdom's perspective.
And it's really important to remember that when you're learning things at school, and I do go out and do your own research because you will find that there is a little bit of taint on your education because you're taught a certain perspective, you're taught a certain rhetoric.
You must tip your toe into other waters in order to get a broader, broader picture of your education, which I think is a lot of what the Renaissance was kind of saying, we can't just go by what our leaders are saying or what our church is saying we have to kind of broaden our horizons and, and look at, look at the look at the bigger picture.
And it was, I think, the annoying thing is that there are there are hypothetical conversation conversations going on that the Renaissance is is a non existent entity in history.
And I understand the reasoning behind it in that it only really existed for those with money and power. Yeah. You know, the Renaissance only because let's face it, the only people who had the time to think about things beyond the end of the day, and the money they were getting bread and meat that they were eating was people that didn't have to worry about those things.
And they're the minority, they're the elite. They knew where their meal was coming from because they had people that were going to get it for them that enabled them to then broaden their horizons proverbially speaking, therefore, in the Renaissance exists and history is written by those people that had the money and power to write the books and talk about this Renaissance.
I shouldn't I should point out as well that the Renaissance wasn't this thing that being the light comes on and all of a sudden you realize there's a Renaissance, like it happened over 200 years, and nobody knew it was really happening.
Which is kind of happened. As a matter of fact, a layman, the worker had no bloody idea that it was happening at all. It was only really the powers that be knew this kind of movement was happening in that this transition was happening and eventually it filled a day.
Absolutely. Like, you know, like the fact that anti church pamphlets were being written, the fact that books were available to more, more rich people
doesn't change the fact doesn't really affect you if you're illiterate, if you're an illiterate fisherman. Yeah, or a farmer.
Or, to be fair, it doesn't really affect you all that much. If you're one of the many workers in
Yeah, in any of the kind of in the first factories in the city states where crafts people would be gathered from throughout the country, and at least given a station where they could work, whereas before maybe they were destitute or had a successful, successful business.
Although they were drawn together. It was other people, it was the rich, it was the elite who still benefited from their from their labors. Yeah.
As we're, we're coming towards the end of time, just very quickly. I've only just found out about my favorite person from the Renaissance, but just so that I've always given other people the choice first, who, although we've talked about most influential
as a person who is your favorite figure from the Renaissance, and what it is about them that you respect or like.
I think Da Vinci.
Da Vinci because his art world is still today so
influential and the bloke was designing things like helicopters.
Yeah, and stuff way before he even knew anything about
like.
So the guy was, if an alien existed in humanity in the 1415 hundreds, it was Da Vinci. He was way before his time. He was so clever so intelligent and an incredible artist and philosopher and mathematician and archer.
God, just the thought of being good at all of those things hurts my brain but yeah he was all of the above.
Absolutely.
For me, although it's somebody in the later Renaissance.
It was somebody called Baphomet Lemieux
De La Carces
who isn't massively famous because his contribution was a reaction against some of the things that started had started to happen as a result of the Renaissance, he was literally the first.
So you know about like William Wilberforce.
Yeah.
Yeah, the bloke, the former slaver who then became an advocate for abolition.
Yeah.
Weird enough, it turns out that this had actually happened several hundred years before.
And it was this bloke.
Who was the like the first person who in his young life went out to Cuba and went out to the islands
in the Americas and annoyingly carved out a fortune for himself
through, if I'm honest with you, bloodshed and exploitation.
But then, he was only doing what he was taught.
Well, this is the thing, he did it.
Then he became the first Catholic priest in the new in the new Americas.
And he continued to he continued to gain from these evil things and then he read.
And then he went a bunch of other priests came over from Spain and started pointing out what you guys doing.
This is literally this is literally genocide.
What what are you doing?
He rebuffed them, sent them back.
But then five years later, he was reading the Bible.
He came across a line in Ecclesiastes 34 verse 18, which basically pointed out that God doesn't look favorably on an offer to him,
which was taken by by evil gains or by if you're a dick and you profit by it and you try and give it to God,
God doesn't like that is the very layman translation of it.
And it's really weird that this bloke who had been oppressing the people in the people in these islands,
he he he loaned own some land in Haiti and he had a complete turnaround.
And he immediately gave back his land to the natives and then started to convince trying to convince all of his other landowning friends that they should do the same.
It went down like a lead balloon.
He stopped being quite as rich.
He slowly but surely lost all of his political power.
And he wasn't able to he did his very, very best to convince people he wasn't able to.
And he ended up.
Yeah, he ended up becoming a monk.
But it's just it's interesting to me that at the very least he celebrated nowadays because he realized what he was doing was wrong and changed his mind.
I reckon he's got a conversation with a burning bush.
Maybe maybe he did.
Maybe he did.
It says he was just reading the book, but I don't know what he saw or if he had any dreams or anything.
I should have maybe researched it more.
If he was in South South America, then you might have taken a bit of ayahuasca and then you definitely would have had a conversation with a burning bush.
To be fair, hallucinogenics have been used for most societies in a whole different topic.
Listen, you know what? Right. That is another one that will do at another point.
But yeah, he's he's my favorite.
And it's annoying, though, because he's my favorite simply because a lot of the other ones were well, they were all products of their time.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think it's important to remember that they were taught a specific way of thinking and they like to think they were quite revolutionary in the way they were thinking.
But at the end of the day, they were subject to the times.
And yeah, like Martin Luther was fantastic in that he was able to denounce the Pope's use of finances.
But he himself was not prosemitic and was not pro-islam.
I mean, he was he was a subject.
He didn't get a scholarship for his religious studies because his father was so bloody rich.
His father was a copper miner and owned copper mines.
And as such, when it came to him changing from law to religion studies, he couldn't get a scholarship because he's because he had too much money.
So my God, it wasn't like I said, the Renaissance existed only for the elite.
You know, it was certainly wasn't a lowly fisherman.
Right. And then this is why Martin Luther wasn't just stoned to death by a rabble.
Absolutely.
Because he was that because he was that rich.
He had money. He had spending in society.
He wasn't just picking up peanut shells.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, I think.
My very least favorite character of the Renaissance is Hernan Cortez.
But that's a whole other conversation for another time.
I mean, I don't have I don't I really don't know enough to have a least favorite.
I think from an English perspective, you've got to you've got to have a bit of a distaste when you talk about Henry VIII.
But it doesn't come without it.
Like once again, he was a subject of his own.
Yeah, I mean, to be standing.
Like if a girl smiles at me too much, I'll start getting big headed.
Imagine, you know, being pampered to your entire life.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't know that Green Sleeves was actually written.
I say written. I use that term in very loose quotation marks by Henry VIII.
He wrote Green Sleeves as a wooing for Anne Boleyn.
I say he did. Obviously, he had a court minstrel that wrote it for him and made him go and perform it to Anne Boleyn to woo her.
And you do wonder how much of anything the people who wrote these things actually came up with.
But yeah, you know, like the fact that the Renaissance was you could only have books on the quadrivium if you could afford books.
And that was definitely not everyone.
Yeah. I mean, I was watching a complete tangent here.
But once again, that whole topic of you wonder how much somebody that wrote the book actually has to do with the research.
I watched Oppenheimer and he really learned that actually Oppenheimer was just the guy at the head of the operation.
There were scientists that kind of had the thinking that made it go the way that it did.
And Oppenheimer was just the guy leading the road, leading the car as it were, as it traveled down that road.
No, he was just the guy at the wheel with very limited control over where it was going.
Don't get me wrong. The guy was very much he had a number of the pinnacle ideas that led to the hydrogen bomb.
But there were scientists below that made his vision a reality.
I don't know that his education would have been enough on its own to make the hydrogen bomb a reality.
That's fair. And that's a good point.
Kids, if you're listening to this, first off, you probably would be better served by other people.
But secondly, don't be careful of what you're part of.
I know I've been part of things that in hindsight I'm not necessarily too happy with.
But anyway, yeah, so that was the Renaissance, guys.
It was a massive cultural movement over the 15th and 16th century from feudal individual countries in Europe to Europe as a mass identity.
The beginnings of colonialization, corporations beginning to have their power, the rise of the mercantile classes, innovations in art and visual representation,
and the death of a theocracy, a theocratic state in the form of the end of the Byzantine Empire.
Yeah, thank you very much for listening. Goodbye from myself.
And goodbye from me.
Have a good night, everyone. Bye.