RENAISSANCE EAST AND WEST

The Renaissance was a decisive movement in world history. It developed as a cultural and intellectual movement in the global context. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe and Muslim world engaged in intense exchange of ideas, objects, and skills shaped the Renaissance in Europe and in the Muslim World. This course will begin with a critical history of the evolution of the term. It will then trace the history of the Renaissance from its origins in the fourteenth century, when the political and commercial worlds of both Europe and Asia were undergoing profound changes, to the highpoint of intellectual, economic and political exchanges between East and West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will address the intellectual, religious and political developments that defined the Renaissance, such as humanism, revival of the ancient texts in the Muslim world, Mongols, the Crusades, papal schism in Italy in the late fourteenth century, the northern European Reformation of the sixteenth century, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Finally, the course will consider the so-called Age of Discovery, the great overseas voyages of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan that took place between 1480 and 1540. It will explore these voyages in the light of the desire to reach the markets of the east, and follow their development and consequences through the rise of maps and charts.