Renaissance

For all of its enduring resonance, the uniqueness or even basic coherency of speaking about a historical period of the European “Renaissance” has been a point of deep historiographic debate since scholars first began trying to pin down not only when the Renaissance occurred, but what exactly made it different from previous eras. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of that history and the historiographic debates about how to identify and conceptualize the Renaissance or early modernity. It will then proceed to a very broad overview of the scholarly debates about “civic humanism” and particularly the centering or re-conceptualization of “freedom” associated with Renaissance/early modern thought humanist debates about toleration and the tension between what has been called “pluralism” and “rationalism” that developed during the period and the “frame” of sovereignty and law that emerged with the rise to hegemony of the state and the international state system.