Thoughts on Renaissance

Thoughts on how everything is connected, how a source creates a river of influence and how civilisations flourish on their way.

I am reading the book: The Untuning of the Sky by John Hollander, not an easy read but a b read,

Stephan Gosson, the cleverest cofounder of music in the Elizabethan era, (1579),

“He urges his readers: If you will be good scholars, and profite well in the Art of Musicke, shutte your Fidels in their cases, and looke vp to heauen: the order of the spheres, the vnfallibke motion of the planets, the iuste course of the yeere, and varieties of seasons, the Concorde of the elements and their qualyties, Fyre, Water, Ayre, Earth, Heate, Colde, Moysture and Drought concurring together to the constitution of earthly bodies and sustenance of euery creature.”

It was interesting to read that renaissance, the enlightenment began a century later in England, classical influence on music and poetry began in the last quarter of the fifteen century, enlightenment the name is related to the mysticism of the Pythagorean school and the Platonism of the classic Greece later on, coming to England through Europe, Italy in particular, from Constantinople mostly after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.

Men and women of letters, scholars, books hiding the wisdom of centuries in all areas of knowledge science, mathematics, astronomy, music, poetry, entered Europe through Italy where it was locked for a hundred years before it was spread to Northern Europe. What an amazing influence the source and the river of wisdom beginnings from the ancient mystics, the school of Pythagoras of the Great Greece, and even before him his teachers of Northern Africa and later the school of Plato in Ancient Greece and from there through Byzantium where Arts and Sciences continues to flourish for a thousand years until the fall of Constantinople, knowledge and wisdom through books and teachers pass to Europe and to the rest of the world.