| The purpose of this research is to seek and eventually follow lines of cultural production within Europe and specifically Italy between 1180-1320 that gave rise to a particular conception of the individual. This conception had as much to do with negation as affirmation and as such, sustained a tension partly responsible for the explosion of creativity that was to follow on the peninsula following the Black Death. It was a concept at first broached by the Franciscans and inaugurated by a sense of loss, the very real loss of Jerusalem in the late twelfth century. The loss of the Christian locus latreia gave way to a metaphorical and imaginative reality of Christ the wanderer, the man, the neighbor. God and man had begun a dialogue at long last, and the vernacular of salvation was Jesus Christ. It was the beginning of the Incarnational Age.;The rise of Francis and his Order, the solidification of transubstantiation as doctrine, the uniformity of homiletic subjects as manuals became more widespread, the rise of an increasingly urban elite and the pacification of the West under the impetus of Crusade against both Muslim and heretical Christian, all contributed to the rapid dissemination of key ideas. These ideas became digested in particular, even provincial ways because of the increasing use of the vulgar tongue in poetry and prose, personal interpretation in artistic endeavor, and the rise of nominalism as a challenge to absolutes. As Christ as person became a consistent idea, the relationship towards that idea would become one of identification; and just as much as Christ could be us, we indeed could be Christ. This had much to do with engendering a particular individualism that would quicken the later Renaissance into its fullest expression, an epoch unintelligible without an Incarnational premise. |
