It is as difficult to find a comprehensive formula for what the
Renaissance meant as to tie it down to a date. The year 1453 A.D., when
the Eastern Empire--the last relic of the continuous spirit of
Rome--fell before the Turks, used to be given as the date, and perhaps
the word "Renaissance" itself--"a new birth"--is as much as can be
accomplished shortly by way of definition. Michelet's resonant
"discovery by mankind of himself and of the world" rather expresses what
a man of the Renaissance himself must have thought it, than what we in
this age can declare it to be. But both endeavours to date and to define
are alike impossible. One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the
theory of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn--a sudden passage
to light from darkness--is not to be considered. The Renaissance was,
and was the result of, a numerous and various series of events which
followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the
beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First and most immediate in its
influence on art and literature and thought, was the rediscovery of the
ancient literatures. In the Middle Ages knowledge of Greek and Latin
literatures had withdrawn itself into monasteries, and there narrowed
till of secular Latin writing scarcely any knowledge remained save of
Vergil (because of his supposed Messianic prophecy) and Statius, and of
Greek, except Aristotle, none at all.
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