The Dark Side Of Renaissance

The Renaissance was a great era of exploration. Although this increased Europeans’ knowledge and
understanding of the world and led to many scientific discoveries, it had a dark side in the
development of conquest, exploitation, and colonialism of people in Africa and the Americas.
One way of addressing the dark side of the Renaissance is to look at the Euro-centric concept as an
outgrowth of early globalization.The mineral wealth, especially silver, extracted from the New
World, supported Europe’s economic boom. The crusades had required massive outlays of money
and human labour, which the European powers aimed to recoup through colonizing the Americas.
Closely related to the economic exploitation of resource extraction was the racially unbalanced
exploitation of human resources. Encountering so many different types of people in the Americas
was unsettling to the least. The Europeans struggled to locate them in the primarily Biblical, Judeo-
christian conceptual universe. Bringing them to spiritual salvation all too often was enforced rather
than voluntary. Europeans were often confident of their own superiority and formulated new ideas
about “natural” hierarchy that justified European domination. Even in Shakespeare’s Tempest we
find references to Americans’ inferiority and even questioning their humanity:
“O brave new world, that has such creatures in it!”

Enslaving Africans to send them to work on New world plantations largely grew out of the
Renaissance economic expansion, for disease had killed millions of Native Americans. Still others had
died in the wars of conquest.

In culture as well, especially in literacy because Europeans deemed writing the supreme form of
communication, European dominance was promoted. As Indians learned to read and write, mostly in
the conqueror’s tongue, they simultaneously were encouraged to denigrate their own culture and
admire that of the conquerors.
First, in religion, the renaissance was marked by the reformation, which consisted of two different
approaches to church reform. One resulted in protestantism, which broke away from the authority
of the roman catholic church; the other-properly termed the counter-reformation-attempted reform
of abuses within the church . The dark side of this reform was the ensuing period of devastating
religious warfare that consumed europe.
The development of new technologies is often viewed as a positive element of this period, but this
also included advanced weaponry. Which allowed people to kill each other far more efficiently than
they previously could. New technology also made many jobs obsolete, disrupting the lives of skilled
craftspeople.
Colonization Of Language

That language, and language alone, distinguishes human beings from other living systems is a belief
upon which an ideological network was built. The elevation of language authorized the efforts by
philosophers and men of letters to expand upon a linguistic foundation.
When a nation receives another language, it also jointly admits the letters/syllables with which the
language is written, and if it loses its spoken language, it also loses the form of the letter with which
it is written.

Colonization Of Space
 A late-sixteenth-century European perspective of the world
According to scholars of Chinese culture and civilization,' the Chinese conceptualization of space was
based on a confederation of five directions: north, south, west, east, and middle, with China as the
Middle Kingdom. By redrawing the world map and placing the Pacific instead of the Atlantic at the
center of the world Lately Mateo Ricci utilized some false teachings to fool people, and scholars
unanimously believed him.He put Europe at the center of map. He attempt to deceive people on
things which they personally can not go to verify for themselves. It is really like the trick of a painter
who draws ghosts in his pictures.
This shows that during the era of renaissanse the center does not depend necessarily on geometric
rationalization but, on the contrary the movable geometric rationalizations are enacted around the
power of the ethnic center .Once the ethnic perspective is detached from the geometric one, the
authoritative center becomes a matter of political power rather than of ethnic subjectivity.

Renaissance Slavery

During the Renaissance and Reformation, the reason for enslaving Africans was that they were non-
Christian. But after Virginia decree in 1667 converted slaves could be kept in bondage not because
they were non-Christian, but because they had non-Christian ancestry. In the teachings or
Reformers, hardly anything can be found for support of slavery and the slave trade. On the contrary,
the very foundations of the Protestant Reformation rested on the appeal to the "common man".
The first slaves were brought to Portugal in 1441. Slaves were being brought to work on South
American and Caribbean plantations under Portuguese and Spanish rule by 1502.As to the
Reformation, there was no slavery amongst the early Protestants in Northern Europe: not among
German Lutherans, nor Swiss Reformed, nor the Reformers in England. The majority of the leaders
and members of the crusade to abolish the slave trade, then slavery, were evangelical Protestants,
first in Britain, then in the United States
Basically, only economic benefits encouraged slavery. European powers proceeded to explore,
colonize and exploit the New World for the good of their homelands that was the reason of slavery
and the trade.

Witchcraft

Several nonsensical superstitions involving witches also emerged during this period. Many of these
superstitions arose in order to explain how witches committed the crimes they were accused of. In
order to account for a witch committing the many crimes they were accused of in a short period of
time, witches were said to be able to fly on a broomstick.
Before the Renaissance, peasants (usually women) would often use incantations and folk remedies
to make predictions and settle arguments. These witches were known to be either good or bad,
depending on their specific uses of magic. This religion-centered stance on witchcraft was present
mainly in Eastern and Central Europe.
The witch hunts and executions in France, Germany, and Scotland were far more deadly than in
England, and they occurred after the onset of the Black Plague in the fourteenth century. In England,
on the other hand, the witch craze grew out of a changing social structure. Unlike devils, monsters,
and dragons, witches are much more humanlike, which made people realize that they could use
certain members of the population as scapegoats to cover up their wrongdoings. The typical person
that was accused of witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an old,
isolated, poverty-stricken woman. These women were targets first and foremost because of their
vulnerability. They had no friends or family to take their side, so when others ganged up on them,
there was really nothing they could do. In the European Renaissance, witches were accused of just
about anything.
The rise, spread, and decline of the witch craze in Elizabethan England spanned from about 1500 to
1700. After 1700, the dawn of the Enlightenment and more scientific ways of thinking gave way to
more rational and logical explanations for phenomena such as crop failure and curdled milk. he last
woman to be executed for being a witch was Jane Wenham, who was executed in 1712. From then
on, the idea of a witch slowly morphed into a character that children want to dress up as on
Halloween, rather than a vulnerable human being who was wrongly accused of some array of
crimes.

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