英国文学史及选读chapter 5 the Renaissance

Progressive writers known as humanists
In literature,
in the 14th and 15th centuries, in Italy, we have Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto 阿里奥斯托 and Tasso 塔索; In the 16th century in France there were Rabelais (拉伯雷， 弗朗索瓦) and Montaigne (蒙田); In Germany, von Hutten (胡滕，乌尔里希·冯) (a supporter of Martin Luther) and Martin Luther; In Holland Erasmus 伊拉兹马斯; In Spain Cervantes 塞凡提斯; And in England Thomas More and Marlowe and Shakespeare.
In Italy, France and Germany a new literature arose, the first modern literature; shortly afterwards came the classical epochs of English and Spanish literature. The bounds of the old orbis terrarum were pierced. Only now for the first time was the world really discovered and the basis laid for subsequent world trade and the transition from handicraft to manufacture, which in its formed the starting point for modern large industry.
And while the burghers and nobles were still fighting one another, the peasant war in Germany pointed prophetically to future class struggles, not only by bringing on to the stage the peasants in revolt – that was no longer anything new – but behind them the beginning of the modern proletariat, with the red flag in their hands and the demand for common ownership of goods on their lips.
In the manuscripts saved from the fall of Byzantium, in the antique statutes dug out of the ruins of Rome, a new world was revealed to the astonished West, that of ancient Greece; the ghost of the Middle Ages vanished before its shinning forms; Italy rose to an undreamt-of flowering of art, which seemed like a reflection of classical antiquity and was never attained again.
The dictatorship of the church over men’s minds was shattered; it was directly cast off by the majority of the Germanic peoples, who adopted Protestantism, while among the Latins a cheerful spirit of free thought, taken over from the Arabs and nourished by the newly discovered Greek philosophy, took root more and more and prepared the way for the materialism of the 18th century.”
3) geographical discoveries opened up colonial expansion and trade routes to distant parts of the world and brought back gold and silver and other wealth and also broadened men’s mental horizons; 4) in the countryside the peasants were terribly exploited and they either rose in uprisings or ran away and flocked to the cities and added to the proletariat 无产阶级 there;
5) in the cities the merchants and the master artisans grew in wealth and in power and became the bourgeoisie, while handicraft turned gradually into manufacture and the modern proletariat sprang up among the employed workers in the factories;
The chief characteristics of Engel’s analysis
1) politically the feudal nobility lost their power and with the establishment of the great monarchies there was the centralization of power necessary for the development of the bourgeoisie; 2) the Catholic church was either substituted by Protestantism as a result of the so-called Reformation 宗教改革 (as in Germany and England) or weakened in its dictatorship over men’s minds (as in Italy and France and Spain);
As they best voiced the human aspirations for freedom and equality and against the tyranny of feudal rule and ecclesiastical domination. And they used various ways to attack the civil wars and welcome the centralized rule of monarchs, sing the praises of geographical and scientific discoveries and explorations and with them the trade expansions and the amassing of wealth from abroad, condemn political oppression and religious dogmatism and persecution and satire the numerous social vices of money-worship and cheating and dissipation 挥霍 and hypocrisy 伪善 of all sorts.
English Literature of the Renaissance
Chapter 5 Section I The Historical Background: Economic, Political and Cultural
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The Renaissance in Europe
The Renaissance as an epoch of social and cultural development embraced all Western Europe. On the foundations of medieval society and culture the Renaissance first rose in Italy in the 14th century and came to a flowering in the 15th and then in the 16th century it spread to other countries, notably France, and thence to Germany and England and Spain and the Low Countries (Holland and Belgium).
About the chief characteristics of this epoch Engels wrote in his introduction to the “Dialectics of Nature 自然辩证法”: