Renaissance & Reformation

Something shifts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — not all at once, and not without resistance. The stable certainties of the Medieval world come under pressure from every direction: Pico della Mirandola reimagines humanity as self-creating rather than divinely fixed; Copernicus displaces the earth from the center of the cosmos; Luther sets individual conscience against the authority of the Church; Galileo insists on seeing for himself rather than trusting inherited texts. By the time Shakespeare writes Hamlet at the turn of the seventeenth century, the old order is cracking open, and the play registers both the exhilaration and the vertigo of living in a world where the familiar certainties no longer hold.