Towards a History of the Renaissance Idea of Wisdom

Abstract

The history of Tudor and early Stuart England', Professor Mark Curtis writes at the beginning of his bookOxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558-1642, ‘defies all attempts to characterize it briefly. In the life of the period the old and new were almost inextricably intertwined. They can now be separated only at the risk of sacrificing truth to misleading over-simplification.'1 Indeed, of the Renaissance in general the same can be said, and must be said as a primary assumption by one undertaking the study of the development of the period's ideas. For, as again Curtis observes, ‘Though the revisionists who have attempted to make the Renaissance a part of the Middle Ages may have failed to prove their case, they have demonstrated first that some phenomena, once thought uniquely characteristic of Renaissance culture, were present by more than coincidence in medieval civilization and second that important features of medieval thought and attitudes persisted as fundamental, constituent parts of the Renaissance mind'.