르네상스, 짜여진 신화에서 파편화된 역사로

The Renaissance, from Well.structured Myth toward Fragmented History

Ever since Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering work, the Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, for Renaissance students and the Western people as well the Renaissance has been a myth and fantasy. Indeed, it has been interpreted as a major turning point in European history, so to speak, an age of grand cultural achievements and of flowering individuality. Above all, it has been firmly believed that, as a foundation of our own culture, the Renaissance inaugurated modernity. By critically scrutinizing such traditional notions of the Renaissance, this study surveys how and in what epistemological grounds Renaissance scholarship in the twentieth century has metamorphosed itself, and examines how it will go in the future. In so doing, ultimately, this study aims at rescuing the Renaissance from the realm of myth, by which the Renaissance has been perfunctorily considered a cradle of modern civilization, to that of history in which otherness of Renaissance world can be historically sensed. This study begins with describing contours in that current Renaissancescholarship can emerge. In particular, it argues that social, cultural and women's history and postmodernism.oriented New historicism have had great impact upon correcting the traditional views of the Renaissance. Based upon what they have argued and found both thematically and methodologically, it summarizes the current trends and characteristics of Renaissance scholarship as an expansion of interdisciplinary studies, and an increase in micro. historical approaches and accompanying revival of narrative in historical writings. Furthermore, it maintains that, under the influence of them, the old image of the Renaissance as a unified and rejuvenating epoch is now changed into the fragmented portrait of distant, other world. Consequently, pursuit of historicity rather than modernity has occupied current Renaissance historians' major concerns, and, in the process of this gradual change, our understanding of the Renaissance will be more broadened and fragmented in its richness in the arena not of myth but of history.