TY  - JOUR
T1  - The Renaissance Revisited: From a Silk Road Perspective
AU  - Kim, Tschung-Sun 
JO  - Acta Via Serica
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2018/1/1
DO  - 10.22679/avs.2018.3.1.11
KW  - Global Renaissance
KW  - Silk Road
KW  - Hemisphere
KW  - Ming
KW  - Joseon
AB  - The Renaissance is generally said to be the rebirth of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, and was centered around Italy from the 14th to the 16th century. This includes the temporal peculiarity of the Renaissance as a sudden phenomenon after the Medieval Ages, and the spatial peculiarity of what happened only in Europe. However, if we remove the European-centered bias here, the horizon for interpreting the Renaissance becomes much wider. There have been claims that similar cultural phenomena resembling the Renaissance existed in other civilizations at the same time. This paper seeks to investigate two possibilities. The first is the possibility of a spatial expansion of the Renaissance. This suggests that the Renaissance was created by long-term exchanges with the Eastern, Middle and Western Hemispheres.1 The second is the possibility of a simultaneity of the Renaissance in the 14th and 16th centuries. This suggests that it was a global phenomenon that occurred in different civilizations. The Renaissance, therefore, was a crystallization of a complex of civilizations created by the crossing of various cultures along the Silk Road, and should be referred to as the ‘Global Renaissance’ instead of the ‘Western Renaissance.’