The discoveries of the Modern Age
Within the modern age, the Renaissance was a break with the Middle Ages, a cultural revolution. According to Eugenio Garin’s words. This rupture was already evident to the contemporaries, who saw it reflected in all areas of culture, as expressing the Frenchman Louis le Roy in 1567.
For a hundred years, not only the things covered before by the darkness of ignorance have become evident, but also many other things that had been ignored by the ancients have been known: new seas, laws, customs, new herbs, trees, minerals, new inventions such as the printing press, artillery and the use of the magnetized needle for navigation. And old languages have been restored ..
In the field of arts and letters, the break was defined by the discovery of antiquity, or even better. For the restoration of ancient culture. Ancient culture that expands through the printing press, through exchanges within the First Republic of the letters of modern times through the educational revolution that all the treasures rescued from classicism were available to elites.
In the field of thought, the Renaissance brought with it a new philosophy (lack of homogeneity, but with a predominance of neoplatonic elements), a new ethic (based on the concept of dignity hominis) and, above all, a new mental attitude,that privileged reason, rejected the dogmatic authority and independent of theology to the various territories of knowledge.
In the field of science, novelties occur above all in the knowledge of physics necessary for the technical innovations of the engineers of the Renaissance, in the orbit of the Pythagorean tradition), in the renewal of astronomical studies, in the advances of theAnatomy and, with much lower strength, in the chemical research of personalities such as Teofrast Bombast von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus "Doctor, Astrolgo and Alchemist One of her contributions to medicine was the creation of the first drugs based on chemicals and minerals".
In Galenic Medicine it begins to be discussed from the anatomical point of view, after a series of findings by the prevesalian anatomists are triggered, among them you can mention Andreas Vesalius, better known as the father of modern anatomy who dedicated himself toDissections in corpses to achieve greater obtaining anatomical knowledge.
Humanism is disseminated in European cultural circles through the constant displacements of books and people, through a constant correspondence that flows in all directions, through the constitution of an authentic Republic of Letters.
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