The Renaissance. A world in motion

Cédric Michon, naturalian, honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France, professor of modern history at the Université Rennes 2

Renaissance Europe is characterized by incredible momentum and universal inventiveness and curiosity. It is the time of the enterprising dreamers who, like Gutenberg, Colomb, Vinci, Michelangelo, Louise Labé, Luther or Copernic, challenge traditions and upset each in their field, what existed before them. Printing, America, perspective, astronomy, the return to ancient thought, the creation of a new Church radically transformed Europe, its means of communication, its religion, its conception of the world and the Universe.
But the Renaissance is not a coherent and easily identifiable historical sequence: it is an Italian explosion, whose amplitude increases and whose wave gradually reaches all parts of Europe; It is also a largely independent movement on the peninsula. The objective of this conference is to try to understand how this state of mind and movement are born, what they owe in the Middle Ages and what they have legave in the following centuries.