VIRTUOUS LIVING - Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Let us turn to the Renaissance debate:The employment of the term “Renaissance” in the development of an “AfricanRenaissance” requires clarification, as the concept is borrowed from the EuropeanRenaissance of the 15 th and 16 th century. Therefore, we commence with a historicalreview of the European Renaissance to see what the term actually signifies.It would be presumptuous to claim that this section is a holistic review of EuropeanRenaissance, since such a review would require a separate study of its own. Thefollowing limitations apply to this review: The review of European Renaissance willbe focused on Italy 12 as the historical locus of the European Renaissance. A limitedpresentation of the spread of the Italian Renaissance to the rest of Europe will begiven to provide a transition and to highlight the effect of the European Renaissanceon the newly “discovered” African continent.1.1 Historical review of the Italian RenaissanceScholars of European history such as J. Burckhardt (1958), P.J. Helm (1961), Hale(1966), J.F. Bernard (1970), S. J. Lee (1984), P. Burke (1987), and D. Hay & J. Law(1989), confirm that the Italian Renaissance developed into or influenced theEuropean Renaissance. The arguments that similar developments could be locatedelsewhere on the European continent at that time, are always submerged by theenthusiasm with which the Italians embraced the “spirit of the new age” which theylater named “a rebirth (rinascita)” (Helm 1961:1). The artists and historians of arts inItaly, in about 1550, coined the term “rinascita”. This word became popular throughits French translation, namely “renaissance” (Hay and Law 1989:3-4). The term wasthen “used to characterise the culture of the fifteenth-century Italy and then that of allWestern European civilisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Hay andLaw 1989:3-4). What was the spirit that gripped the hearts of the Italians, and later, allthe Europeans?12 The review of European Renaissance in Italy falls into two categories. The first covers those aspectsthat may be viewed as the embodiment of the Renaissance spirit. Here I include classical learning, thehumanism movement, political organisation, and the revival of art. The second deals with those aspectsthat may be construed as constraints, or even contradictions, of the Renaissance spirit. These includewars, famines, diseases, and moral deterioration.26