Renaissance
"Renaissance" is the term customarily employed to designate a cultural movement that began in Italy in the middle of the fourteenth century and spread throughout the rest of Europe. Although the term is well established in the writings of historians, its usefulness has been challenged. Indeed, there has grown up around the concept of the Renaissance an extensive controversy that sometimes threatens completely to divert the attention of scholars from the historical facts. In part, this controversy is simply an acute form of the general problem of periodization in history. The concept of the Renaissance, however, arouses particularly strong opposition because it involves a disparagement of the preceding period, the Middle Ages (medium aevum), from which culture presumably had to be awakened.
The idea of a rebirth of literature or of the arts originated in the period itself. Petrarch in the fourteenth century hoped to see an awakening of culture, and many later writers expressed their conviction that they were actually witnessing such an awakening in their own time. Latin was generally the language used by cultivated men to discuss such matters, but no single Latin term or phrase became the standard name for the whole cultural epoch. One of the earliest historians of philosophy in the modern sense, Johann Jakob Brucker, in 1743 referred to the Renaissance only as the "restoration of letters" (restauratio literanum), and wrote of the "recovery of philosophy" (restitutio philosophiae): Even in an earlier German work he used such Latin phrases.
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