Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the Renaissance marked the first time in centuries that Europeans had launched anything like a concerted and scientific attempt to investigate and record the past. The author points out that, in rediscovering the works of the great Classical historians such as Tacitus, Livy and Herodotus, the scholars of the later Middle Ages and Early Renaissance were digging into more than simply a huge treasure-trove of information; they were also unearthing a long-lost method of logic and inquiry. The paper stresses that, in reexamining these ancient histories, the great minds of the Renaissance were beginning to set limits on what was acceptable and what was not acceptable in academic research, to be critical of the material, not always automatically assuming that all was correct, the recorder of that material had been unbiased or had even been properly qualified to give the information at hand. Several long quotations.

From the Paper:

"The Renaissance's discovery of the concept of historical perspective was to have dramatic consequences at the time, but even more astounding consequences for the future. The realization that actions had direct consequences, that a provable pattern actually existed, forced human beings to look at, and analyze their actions. Things could be seen to work because they truly made sense; and those things that "did not make sense" could be dispensed with - dispensed with the full understanding of what it was that was wrong with them. Our generation has inherited the taste for scientific experimentation that began in those far-off centuries. A reliance on the firm belief that there is a real logic to the world, and the cosmos, has permitted us to make discoveries that would have been impossible for our ancestors."

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