CSP
The French word ‘renaissance’ has originated from the Latin word ‘renasci’ that means ‘to be born again’. In English ‘the Renaissance’ means the rebirth or revival of the ancient Greek and Roman knowledge, art, and culture.
The rebirth was caused by a historical event. In 1453, with the fall of the then Constantinople, the scholars living there fled to different countries of Europe, especially to Italy. They took with them the ancient Greek and Italian literature that gradually became the center of interest of the people. The ancient learning was rediscovered. This discovery or rebirth is called the Renaissance that kindled a kind of wildfire of knowledge that kept on burning for several centuries.
In England, the Renaissance led the writers to classical leaning that liberated them from religious control. it broadened the literary, philosophical, and intellectual horizons. It generated among them the spirit of adventure, inquiry, empiricism, and doubt in old ideas. The Humanistic movement that started with it enhanced sensitiveness to the formal beauty and the cultivation of the aesthetic sense.
The sense of beauty influenced architecture, sculptor, painting, music dancing mime drama costume, and the like.
In literature also it took numerous forms. Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, and many other writers had been writing in the literary atmosphere. Their literary works are the fullest flowering of the Renaissance spirit. The Renaissance was, thus, the result of various series of events that followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century.