Module 6: Renaissance Literature & Language Essay Paper

You should review the grading and composition expectations prior to submitting your paper to ensure you are meeting all the requirements.
One of the fundamental questions literary scholars often ask is the following: Why tell this particular story, and why tell it in this particular way? Try to bring this question to your responses to these works of fiction. You must also think about why a writer might use fiction to philosophize -- and particularly, a writer from the Renaissance. (By the way, this same question can help you analyze other narrative works of art, from paintings to plays.) Save your paper file with your last name and module number (it should look something like this - champagne_G2_M2.doc)
Please read the To Do. Then write the essay with all the requirement that teacher need especially the in text citation. write more you think rather people already know. Least two page for the essay part without the title. Thank you.

Individual Response PapersFor each module, you will be handing in a piece of writing, either a paper or discussion post and response to two other people's posts.
Process
Your paper must quote a passage from one of the readings assigned for that module and then comment upon that passage in some way: interpret it, extend it, refute it, question it, whatever you choose, as long as you are drawing out something in the passage related to the ways in which it philosophizes on the subjects of love and/or sex. Read the passage as carefully as you can, taking into consideration the context from which it is drawn.
The passage you discuss should be roughly the length of a paragraph, and your commentary should at the very least be equivalent in length to the passage you cite. These writing assignments will form the basis of the group module discussion/writing assignment.
Basic Requirements
• The writing assignment must be typed, double-spaced, using 12 point font.
• The assignment must be two to three pages long.
No late assignments will be accepted, period.

Module 6: RenaissanceIn this module we will read writings of Giovanni Boccaccio and Antonio Panormita.
Learning Goals
• Interpret how humanism is reflected in writing during the Renaissance
• Discuss the use of fiction to portray sexuality and gender
• Explore how these works of fiction might disrupt our preconceived notions of "early modern" (Renaissance) representations of sex and love
To Do
• Read the online material
• Read First Day, Fourth Story - Boccaccio, Giovanni (library reserves)
• Read Third Day, Tenth Story - Boccaccio, Giovanni (library reserves)
• Read Book I. Selections 1.9 through 1.25 - Hermaphroditus (library reserves)
• Read Book II. Selections 2.6 through 2.10 - Hermaphroditus (library reserves)
To Complete
• Complete the Individual Response Paper or Discussion post

Yet it would be misleading to suggest that Renaissance humanism involved some kind of wholesale rejection of Christianity. Much of the greatest works of art from this period were religious in nature, though they were often commissioned by powerful individuals, either religious leaders like the pope and his cardinals, or secular ones. It was common during this period for families to buy burial space in the side chapels of churches and to display their commissioned religious art works in them. Images of the Sibyls, those figures that represent a kind of reconciliation between paganism and Christianity, can be seen today on the ceiling of Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel, one of the greatest examples of Renaissance fresco (wall) painting. Renaissance monarchs, including the pope, allegedly ruled by divine right, and some historians have argued that, in parts of Italy and Germany at least, the late Middle Ages, the period of the communes, was closer to modern day democracy than the later Renaissance city-states ruled by the pope or hereditary monarchs.
That is, between the fall of the Roman empire and the Renaissance - specifically, in the late 11th and early 12th centuries - a number of cities in Italy and Germany were to some degree self-ruled (though usually by powerful and wealthy families and not by universal suffrage). Today, these cities are referred to as the Medieval communes.
Painted for a government building in the commune of Siena, Italy, one of the first instances of non-religious art in the West is a series of frescoes illustrating "good” and "bad" government. The Medicis began as part of a collection of families who ruled Florence. Eventually, they managed to become sole rulers and then dukes, a title they received from the pope. The path, then, from the Roman Empire to contemporary democracy was hardly a straight line, and we have to keep in mind that history does not always equal progress
But scholars sometimes see the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as one characterized by a change in the role of religion in the individual's life.
Rather than the medieval notion of life's purpose as being preparation for the afterlife in heaven, Renaissance thinkers saw human life as valuable and even pleasurable for its own sake. Some of the greatest works of art from this period - Sandro Boticelli's The Birth of Venus, for example - were paintings that were commissioned for individuals and took as their subject matter pagan themes and celebrated earthly sensuality. Rather than being recycled for Christian purposes, Greco-Roman sculpture in particular came to be valued for its own sake and imitated; the first free-standing nude male sculpture made since antiquity was Donatello's bronze statue David, (c. 1440s), commissioned by the Medicis. While the subject matter is ostensibly religious, as David is the King David from the Bible who slew Goliath, the way David is presented is through Classical conventions. And David was a symbol of Florence that the Medicis were, in an effort to justify their power, trying to make their own.
Unfortunately, this embracing of life for its own sake led to a certain degree of greed and corruption, particularly among the nobility and even the popes, many of whom were from noble families. (It was typical for the eldest son of a wealthy family to inherit the bulk of the estate, and for the second son to then enter the priesthood in the hopes of becoming first cardinal and then pope. Several wealthy Renaissance popes also fathered illegitimate children, despite their vows of celibacy.) The Reformation and Counter-Reformation - that is, the split within Christianity to some degree inaugurated by Martin Luther and the Catholic church's response to his calls for reform - are generally considered to constitute the end of the Renaissance. Although Luther brought to the foreground certain perceived abuses of church power, throughout the Middle Ages, there had been various attempts to reform the Catholic church from within. We see in the stories of Boccaccio in particular a common if humorous critique of religious orders in particular.

Renaissance the RebirthThe term "renaissance” literally means “rebirth.” As we have seen, such a term suggests that the European Renaissance followed a period of historical and cultural decline. Today, we are somewhat critical of this term, as, like "Middle Ages,” it participated historically in constructing a certain version of the story of Europe that was far from objective. Some thinkers have also started to speak of a series of "renaissances” rather than a single one; as we will see, the first Renaissance humanist we will read, Boccaccio, was actually born in the fourteenth century!

In the fifteenth century, some powerful political interests centered primarily in Italy, including the Medici family in Florence and the pope in Rome, imagined that, after a period of “darkness,” they were the inheritors of the greatness of the Ancient Greco-Roman world and would bring to Europe a "rebirth” - which might also include, to some degree, a reconstitution of the Roman empire as a political unit. (In 1309, midst political turmoil, the seat of the papacy had moved from Rome to Avignon, France, returning in 1378.) This idea then spread beyond Italy to other families who controlled and competed for political power, including the Tudors (in present day Great Britain), the Hapsburgs (in Austria, Germany, and Spain), and the Valois (in France).
As we saw in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, since the adoption of Christianity, there has been a certain tension in Western philosophy between secular and religious ways of understanding. One of the ways some philosophers distinguish between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is that the Renaissance featured a "rebirth” in secular learning accomplished via a return to Classical texts. We have seen that this is somewhat misleading in that, even in the Middle Ages, thinkers still read, discussed, and valued certain pagan texts, but nevertheless the Renaissance was characterized by a renewed interest in pagan philosophy and art. This renewed interest in Greco-Roman culture came to be called humanism.
If, reaching toward heaven and decorated with stained glass windows illustrating the stories of the Bible, the Cathedral was the symbol of the Middle Ages, another form of art, the easel painting, came to symbolize the Renaissance. Rather than simply promoting religious devotion, art began to be valued for its own sake, as well as for the ways in which it might be used as propaganda - as evidence of the greatness of a monarchy, a city-state, or even the papacy, and as a means of conveying their values.
One of the great "inventions” of the Renaissance was linear perspective. (As we have seen, the mathematical formulas that make linear perspective possible were known to the Muslims, who, because of their own religious beliefs, did not use it in their art, and perspective was not completely unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans; frescoes surviving from Pompeii show a placement of figures in architectural space that strikingly resembles certain Renaissance conventions, though these particular paintings were not known to Renaissance artists, as Pompeii was not unearthed in their lifetimes.) Scholars have argued that, while Medieval art offered us multiple views of a scene (as in a present day comic strip) and was a form for mass consumption, to perceive the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface, the spectator must place him or herself in a single, fixed point in front of the canvas. That is, for the illusion to succeed, a person must stand in one - and only one - place directly in front of the image. This "placement” is said to have created in the spectator a sense of individualism very different from the Medieval person's sensation of being part of a larger community of souls awaiting judgment in the afterlife. Another somewhat helpful if simple way of conceptualizing the difference between the two periods is that, if God was, in the Medieval period, the center of the universe, in the Renaissance, human beings took God's place, the convention of linear perspective giving the spectator a view of the world centered on him/herself. (It is no simple coincidence that, in the Renaissance, European science came to discover, through the efforts of Nicolaus Copernicus, that the sun, and not the earth, was the center around which the planets revolved - a discovery that threatened to de-center God himself.)