Student Essay on Petrarch: the Father of the Renaissance

This essay argues that although others have been called the leader of the renaissance in Italy, I argue that Petrarch was truely the father of the Italian renaissance.

Before the civic spirit and individuality evident and necessary to the Renaissance came to fruition, there had to have been something to trigger a change in the mentality of the medieval civilization. The medieval manorialism fostered illiteracy and ignorance and a very narrow view of the outside world, people did not question their place, the church, or the need to prepare for the after life. The "awakening" of the Renaissance came after the dawn of a new Roman Empire way of thinking.. Humanism is the intellectual, literary and scientific movement of the 14th to the 16th centuries without which the Renaissance would never have evolved. Humanism is a rediscovery and reevaluation (analysis) of classical civilization and the application of the aspects of this civilization to intellectual and social culture in the current time. It is a.....