The European Renaissance Essay by writingsensation

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.