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A is for Age…

For the 2022 A to Z challenge, I wrote 26 posts all about the Renaissance. You’ll find juicy gossip about the popes, artwork by Van Eyck and Raphael, the origins of the tarot, and the story behind Da Vinci’s horse. You can scroll through the posts individual by clicking the NEXT button at the very bottom, or you can enter April 2022 in the Search box on the right sidebar.

Welcome to the Renaissance. It’s an Age of …

Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence completed in 1436, photo from WantedinRome.com.
  • Promise
  • Expansion
  • Mercantilism
  • Art
  • Knowledge
  • Rebirth

Renaissance, as I’m sure you remember, means “rebirth.” Ironically this term was created by a French historian centuries after the reborn age was long redead. You can thank Jules Michelet for making the era so hard for historians to spell.

What Was the Renaissance?

The Renaissance was a historical period when culture bloomed like algae on a lake. With the right conditions in place, the growth of population and wealth combined with receding constraints allowed ideas to flourish and accelerate. It exploded out of Italy primarily at first but the changes in art, science, fashion, commerce, and knowledge spread across large swaths of Europe. Soon, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into yet another statue or domed ceiling or argument about which subject in the quadrivium was most important.

Statue from St. Peter’s basilica, Rome. Photo by kajmeister.
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A to Z 2022: The Snackable Renaissance

It’s coming. The blogger’s A to Z challenge for 2022 starts tomorrow, and I’m going all in! Well, partly in. Get ready to learn a little bit about history for the next 26 days…

…the Renaissance!

Close-up of Raphael’s School of Athens, photo by kajmeister.

Why the A to Z Challenge?

Phew! It’s been a busy time here for kajmeister. I know the blogs have thinned out recently. I haven’t been writing much here because I’ve been writing as a student and on my part-time job. Both are things that have emerged because I’ve been here, and because you’ve been reading these blogs. So, Thank You! If you’d like to hear about the Civil War (one of my history classes) or need suggestions for how to make a career change (my writing job), let me know… I’ve probably written something.

Meanwhile, it’s about to be April, and the blogosphere has this crazy challenge called A to Z. Write 26 posts on a theme. It starts off fun, gets a little grueling around L and M, hard to figure out X, Q, and J, and even if Z doesn’t make sense is exciting to write that last letter! It requires both the strategy of how to generate the challenging letters and the stamina of writing a marathon.

Two years ago, when the world shut down for all of us, the A to Z challenge was a sanity check for me. I didn’t know what I was getting into but tried it out using one of my favorite topics. Those 26 posts on the Olympics turned into a mini-book. That, in turn, helped me pitch a longer book to a real live publisher (my book on women at the games, coming this summer, *shameless plug*), and teach two short classes on the subject. I’m also now in graduate school because of that experience, learning how to write history better.

Last year, I wrote about Accounting–my previous career–and had a lot of fun exploring the background of something I knew well technically. This past January, when my first major school project required a research topic, I turned to those accounting blogs. As a result, I’m writing an accounting history paper which I’m to broaden into a thesis and another book. How can accounting history be fascinating you say? Wait two years, and we’ll find out together.

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Herstorians

As we are well into Women’s History Month, accounts abound of wonderful women and their remarkable achievements. I’d like to go straight to the heart of the matter and point out some of the true heroines of Women’s History month: the women historians. We used to say “herstory “back in the ’70s because, often, historians claimed women didn’t do very much. Women have gotten more credit–a whole month now! So I can just use the word to refer to those who write it.

Let’s talk about history by women, who have been writing for nearly as long as the cave paintings. Which might just as likely have been done by women as men, right?

Grand Dames

In fact, the first writer in world literature was a woman. Enheduanna was a priestess in Ur in ancient Sumeria, who composed poems and temple hymns to the goddess Inanna. Not entirely history, but poetry was the way people wrote, and even stories of gods and goddesses are a kind of history.

The first woman formally recognized as a historian was in the 12th century. (There were surely others, but this is the encyclopedia answer to the question.) Princess Anna Comnena, the daughter of Byzantine emperor Alexius I, wrote a 15-volume history about her father’s reign and the era called The Alexiad. She wrote in her spare time, because she also raised four children and administered a 10,000 bed hospital and orphanage in Constantinople. While administering medicine, she became an expert on gout, a disease which pestered her father for years. After Alexius died, Anna plotted to overthrow her newly-crowned brother in favor of herself and her husband, but she lost the fight and her court position as well. Sounds like a series for Showtime to me.

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