The Cane Ridge Revival was a religious revival that occurred in 1799 and 1800 in the USA, and was the first famous religious revival in the United States after the 'Great Awakening', along the western frontier, particularly in Kentucky. It was begun by the inspired preaching of two brothers from Ohio, who addressed a camp meeting on the Red River, and made numerous enthusiastic converts. At the Cane Ridge camp meeting of 1800, the religious enthusiasm was intense. Converts were made by hundreds. Research Cane Ridge Revival
In the chivalric period of the middle ages, courts of love were courts composed of knights, poets, and ladies, who discussed and gave decisions on subtle questions of love and gallantry. The first of these courts was probably established in Provence about the 12th century. They reached their highest splendour in France, under Charles VI, through the influence of his consortIsabella of Bavaria, whose court was established in 1380. An attempted revival was made under Louis XIV by CardinalRichelieu. Research Courts of Love
The Exclusion Bill was passed by the house of commons, but rejected by the house of lords in 1681. The bill sought to exclude the duke of York, afterwards James II, from the throne. the revival of the question led to the dissolution of parliament in 1681. Research Exclusion Bill
The Renaissance was that change in the outlook of Europe which took place during the centuries from the fourteenth to the sixteenth. In its broadest sense the Renaissance affected every department of human life. But in its narrower sense it refers to the revival of the learning of ancient Greece, and to the effects of that revival on the arts and literature of modern peoples. The Church in the Middle Ages had taught men to revere authority and to find in her teaching an answer to all the problems of life, whereas the Greeks taught men to inquire and to explore rather than to accept, and to enjoy rather than to suffer. It was this attitude of mind, more than anything else, which shook the medieval world to its foundations. The views of the ancient Greeks, now re-born into the world, were in sharp contrast with the ideals of the Middle Ages. From these ideals many men for a time turned with a feeling of contempt.
The Renaissance was a many-sided movement: it deeply influenced learning and education, art and architecture, science and invention, geography and exploration, and, above all, religion. After the fall of Rome, a knowledge of Greek had rapidly died out in the West and no provision was made for its teaching similar to that made for Latin. In Italy, owing to the closeness of its relations with the East, the number of scholars, monks, and others, who learnt some Greek was greater than elsewhere. It is not, surprising, therefore, that the revival of learning received its main impulse from Italy. From the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Italian scholars became more and more devoted to ancient studies, and they began to visit Constantinople, where Greek learning had been preserved. There they hunted out, copied, and eagerly studied the precious manuscripts of the past, and these opened up a new world of thought. Further, from the time that the Turks' crossed from Asia into Europe, some of the Greeks themselves began to travel westwards and to accept well-paid teaching posts in the wealthy Italian cities. And, though the revival began in Italy, the new ideas were rapidly circulated by the new printing presses invented at the time, and every nation in due course played its part in the Renaissance.
The great and wealthy city of Florence was the centre of the Italian Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici, a merchant prince who became ruler of the city, was a patron of the New Learning, and he encouraged Greek scholars to settle in Florence. His grandson, Lorenzo de Medici, known as The Magnificent, loved to gather round him the learned men of the day; he spent 60,000 pounds a year on books; and he caused 200 rare manuscripts to be brought from the East to the Medici library. Rome was second only to Florence as a centre of the New Learning. The Popes themselves became great patrons of learning. Nicholas V founded the Vatican Library. When the son of Lorenzo de Medici became Pope as Leo X, the Renaissance in Rome reached its highest point. Leo made Rome, as he said, ' the capital of the world in literature, as it is in everything else'. He provided a hundred professors for his Greek college in Rome, and he brought his father's library to the Holy City. The library was afterwards restored to Florence by his cousin Clement VII, another member of this remarkable Medici family. The New Learning influenced England from the time of Edward IV, and it made great headway in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII when the scholars known as the Oxford Reformers were flourishing.
The first Englishman to bring Greek manuscripts to England was William Selling. One of his pupils was Thomas Linacre, who went to Florence and shared the instruction given to the young Medici princes; he read in the Vatican Library, and made the acquaintance of Aldo at Venice. Another Oxford teacher who drew his inspiration from Italian sources was William Grocyn, one of the first men to give lectures on Greek literature at his University.
One of Grocyn's pupils was John Colet, who visited Italy in 1496 and returned to lecture on the Gospels in the Greek original at Oxford. He and Sir Thomas More, were friends of Erasmus, a Dutch scholar of international fame. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, was herself a patroness of the New Learning. She founded two Cambridge colleges, Christ's and St. John's, and two Lady Margaret Professorships of Divinity, one at Oxford and one at Cambridge. The Revival of Learning was one aspect of the Renaissance; the outburst of artistic energy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was another. The painters of the new period broke away from the conventional art of the Middle Ages and began again to draw from living models. As with the artists, so with the sculptors. Donatello 'went straight with his mighty chisel to original sources - to youth and manhood, and the love of living'. The great figures of that age - Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian - still dominate the history of European art. Examples of their works, and of many other Italian artists of the Renaissance, as well as of the Northern artists - Holbein, Durer, and others - are to be seen in the magnificent collection at the National Gallery.
It was natural that men who sought their inspiration from the Greeks should turn with renewed interest to classical architecture. The ruins of ancient Rome provided examples ready to hand; and soon churches planned like classical temples were rising in every city in Italy. St. Peter's, Rome, was designed by Bramante, and the famous dome added by Michelangelo. But great as was the enthusiasm for this architecture Renaissance architecture did not establish itself in England until the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, though Henry VII's tomb at WestminsterAbbey is an example of the Florentine art of the period.
The Renaissance period, filled as it was with a love of experiment, naturally produced a renewed interest in science. With the exception of isolated geniuses like Friar Roger Bacon, there were no medieval scientists worthy of the name. Practically no scientific discoveries had been made for centuries. Modern Science begins its history with the Renaissance and owes a good deal to Leonardo da Vinci. He was the first of a long line of experimenters whose work has continued to the present day. The greatest shock to the medieval notions of the universe was given by Copernicus. For two thousand years mankind with few exceptions had believed that the earth was the centre of the universe, and that the sun revolved round our planet every twenty-four hours. Such had been the teaching of Ptolemy, the Greek scientist. Another Greek, Pythagoras, had questioned it, and advanced the extraordinary notion that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of the universe; but there were few who accepted his theory until Copernicus turned his attention to the 'solar system'. Through slits cut in the walls of his house, Copernicus watched the movements of the planets. Just before he died in 1543 he published a book - 'The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies' - giving to the world the results of his observations.
Twenty years later the famous Galileo was born at Pisa, and it was he who perfected the telescope. He lived to popularise the theory of Copernicus, but he was nearly put to death for his pains and was forced by the Court of Inquisition to recant. The Italian Galileo, and the English Newton who discovered the laws of gravity, were the two greatest scientists of the seventeenth century. In the realm of geographical discovery, no age in the world' s history was more momentous than the Age of the Renaissance. Columbus, who discovered America; Vasco De Gama, who found the Cape Route to India; Cabot, Cartier, and Cortez, the discoverers of Newfoundland, Canada, and Mexico; Balboa, who first sailed on the Pacific; Magellan, whose ship was the first to sail round the world - all these and many more make the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an era without parallel in the annals of discovery.
The new ideas which came surging into the world during the Renaissance acted in many respects as disruptive forces. This was particularly true in the realm of religion. An unquestioning acceptance of authority - i.e. of the teaching of the Catholic Church - was the keynote of the medieval attitude to life, but an eager, inquiring generation began to question this attitude. Men, too, were shocked by the moral decay of the Church and of the Papacy; voices were raised demanding reforms. Some reformers, like Colet and Erasmus, tried to reconcile the new ideas with the Church of Rome and worked to reform it; others, of whom Luther was the greatest, rejected altogether its authority.
The revolution in European history known as the Reformation was an indirect result of the Renaissance - of the New Learning which invited comparison between the present and the past; of the invention of printing which scattered broadcast the new ideas; and again, of the growing idea of the Nation and with it the supremacy of the State. Research Renaissance
The Wyoming Controversy was a controversy which arose between Pennsylvania and Connecticut in 1782 regarding the jurisdiction of certain lands within the limits of the former State, but which had been settled by Connecticut adventurers. In 1784 the Pennsylvanians attempted to dispossess the Connecticut claimants. This led to bloodshed and to a revival of the Susquehanna Company in Connecticut for the establishment of the latter's claims. John Pranklin, the moving spirit of the Susquehanna Company, was seized and imprisoned by Timothy Pickering, clerk and commissioner of the new county of Luzerne, formed by Pennsylvania from the Connecticut claims in 1787. The question was finally settled in favour of Pennsylvania's jurisdiction in 1790. Research Wyoming Controversy
Edgar the Peaceful) was King of England from 959 to 975. He was born in 944 and died in 975. Edgar was a son of Edmund I, and was elected king by the northern insurgents against his brother Eadwig and on his brother's death in 959 became also king of the West Saxons.
Edgar was a firm and capable ruler, whose power was acknowledged by other rulers in Britain, as well as Welsh and Scottish kings. Edgar's late coronation in 973 at Bath was the first to be recorded in some detail; his queen Aelfthryth was the first consort to be crowned queen of England. Edgar was the patron of a great monastic revival which owed much to his association with Archbishop Dunstan. New bishoprics were created, Benedictine monasteries were reformed and old monastic sites were re-endowed with royal grants, some of which were of land recovered from the Vikings. In the 970s and in the absence of Viking attacks, Edgar - a stern judge - issued laws which for the first time dealt with Northumbria (parts of which were in the Danelaw) as well as Wessex and Mercia. Edgar's coinage was uniform throughout the kingdom. A more united kingdom based on royal justice and order was emerging; the Monastic Agreement passed around 970 praised Edgar as 'the glorious, by the grace of Christ illustrious king of the English and of the other peoples dwelling within the bounds of the island of Britain'. After his death on 8 July 975, Edgar was buried at GlastonburyAbbey, Somerset. Research Edgar The Peaceful
Sir Edmund Dudley was an English statesman. He was born in 1462 and died in 1510. He is noted in English history as an instrument of Henry VII in the arbitrary acts of extortion by the revival of obsolete statutes and other unjust measures practised during the latter years of his reign. On the accession of Henry VIII. he was arrested for high treason, and died on the scaffold with his associate Sir Richard Empson. Research Edmund Dudley
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian novelist and poet. He was born in 1313 at Certaldo and died in 1375. The son of a Florentine merchant, he spent some years unprofitably in literary pursuits and the study of the canon law, but in the end devoted himself entirely to literature. He found a congenial atmosphere in Naples, where many men of letters frequented the court of King Robert, among the number being the great Petrarch.
In 1341 Boccaccio fell in love with Maria, an illegitimate daughter of King Robert, who returned his passion with equal ardour, and was immortalized as Fiammetta in many of his best creations. His first work, a romantic love-tale in prose, Filocopo, was written at her command; as was also the Teseide, the first heroic epic in the Italian language, and the first example of the ottava rima.
In 1341 he returned to Florence at his father's command, and during a three years' stay produced three important works, Ameto, L'amorosa Visione, and L'amorosa Fiammetta, all of them connected with his mistress in Naples. In 1344 he returned to Naples, where Giovanna, the granddaughter of Robert, who had succeeded to the throne, received him. with distinction.
Between 1344 and 1350 most of the stories of the Decameron were composed at her desire or at that of Fiammetta. This work, on which his fame rests, consists of 100 tales represented to have been related in equal portions in ten days by a party of ladies and gentlemen at a country house near Florence while the plague was raging in that city. The stories in this wonderful collection range from the highest pathos to the coarsest licentiousness. They are partly the invention of the author, and partly derived from the fabliaux of mediaeval French poets and other sources.
On the death of his father Giovanni Boccaccio returned to Florence, where he was greatly honoured, and was sent on several public embassies. Amongst others he was sent to Padua to communicate to Petrarch the tidings of his recall from exile and the restoration of his property. From this time an intimate friendship grew up between them which continued for life. They both contributed greatly to the revival of the study of classical literature, Giovanni Boccaccio spending much time and money in collecting ancient manuscripts. In 1373 he was chosen by the Florentines to occupy the chair which was established for the exposition of Dante's Divina Commedia. His lectures continued until his death.
Among his other works maybe mentioned Filostrato, a narrative poem; Il Ninfale Fiesolano, a love story; Il Corbaccio, ossia Il Labirinto d'Amore, a coarse satire on a Florentine widow; and several Latin works. The first edition of the Decameron appeared without date or place, but is believed to have been printed at Florence in 1469 or 1470. The first edition with a date is that of Valdarfer, Venice, 1471; what is, perhaps, the only existing perfect copy of this was sold in London in 1812 for 2260 pounds. Research Giovanni Boccaccio
Johannes Bessarion was a titular patriarch of Constantinople and Greek scholar. He was born in 1389 or 1395 at Trebizond and died in 1472. He was made archbishop of Nicaea by John Palaeologus, whose efforts to unite the Greek and Roman churches he seconded in such a way as to lose the esteem of his countrymen and gain that of PopeEugenius IV, who made him cardinal. He held various important posts, and was twice nearly elected pope. The revival of letters in the fifteenth century owed not a little to his influence. He left translations of Aristotle and vindications of Plato, with valuable collections of books and manuscripts. Research Johannes Bessarion
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
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