Africa, Japan, Renaissance

Contents: Africa Japan Western Europe Key Terms The Christian Continuum

Africa: second largest continent. Covered with thick jungles, tropical rain forests, and because of this it is very bad for farming.  The most populated place is the savanna, which are grassy plains.
Africa's largest and most populated climate zone is the savanna-people go there because they can farm and get food
Barriers to the easy movement of people and goods in Africa include deserts, rapids, jungles and rainforests.
Africa's mineral wealth includes gold, salt, diamonds, iron and copper
Migrations from other lands over thousands of years contributed to cultural diffusion and diversity
Along a wide trade route, Nubia sent goods to the Middle East and the Mediterranean
The Romans changed North Africa by building roads, dams, cities and aqueducts
Camels revolutionized trade across the Sahara because they need little water and can carry heavy loads.

Japan: an archipelago, or chain of islands. Land is very mountainous and it is very bad for farming. Because of this, most people live in river valleys. Japan had feudalism: the shogun was the supreme military commander, warrior lords were the daimyo, the lesser warriors were the samurai, and the bushido was the "way of the warrior," or the code that they had to follow. Most Japanese followed Zen Buddhism, which was a form of Buddhism that was very contradictory. They also followed Shintoism (Animism) and regular Buddhism. Haikus are 17 line Japanese poems with three lines. A Japanese woman wrote the first novel ever written.
Tea Ceremony- religious ritual
Tales of Genji- the first novel (written by a woman)
Ainu- native Japanese people who are discriminated against in Japan
The Tokugawa Shogunate was feudalism with a very centralized government. Trade and economy developed internationally.

Western Europe: the renaissance happened because of a yearning for wisdom during the thirteenth century, the era of crisis. It was a time of much creativity and change politically, culturally, economically, and politically. Renaissance scholars were eager to study things in a worldly, humanist view, rather than through religion. The renaissance started in Italy because it was close to Rome. Since the reawakening of Ancient Roman interest marked the renaissance, and Italy was the center of Rome, it started there.  The Renaissance also brought forth many great artists, including Leonardo de Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Petrarch (was a poet), Machiavelli (The Prince), Castiglione (The Courtier) and Donatello. There was a lot of reformation from the church in the renaissance. The church raised fees for sacraments, let you pay off instead of doing confession, made people pay more for tithes, yet use them for personal uses, gave family members church offices, church officials married, and many more things. Martin Luther (not King) protested about this. He nailed 95 church abuses to the church door as a protest. (He was never really able to reform because the church had so much power.) But after a while, people were able to reform and many different sects of Catholicism came out, including Calvinism, which just expanded the ideas of Luther and Lutheranism. Calvinism is a more extreme form of Lutheranism, which came first. The scientific revolution is technology advances and breakthroughs leading to the end of the renaissance. Copernicus said that the sun is the center of the universe (heliocentric theory.) Gilbert wrote a book that put forth the idea and study of electricity to science. Harvey discovered that blood circulates in the human body to and from the heart and made the first model of a heart. Newton declared gravity as the forth that moves planets around the sun (we're all connected) and all other stuff, too! Galileo perfected one of the first telescopes and formulated the law of falling bodies.

KEY TERMS

Kami- clan gods and goddesses who were generally nature spirits
Kana- phonetic symbols added to Japanese writing (like sign language)
Shinto- worship of forces of nature
Bushido- samurai code of values (emphasized honor and bravery, chivalry)
Daimyo- vassal lords, the shogun distributed lands to them
Haiku- 17-syllable poem with three lines
Kabuki- a puppet show written for the middle class, requires three people for each puppet.
Samurai- knights, fighting aristocracy of early Japan
Shogun- monarch, famous mini-series with Richard chamberlain, had the real power in Japan, supreme military commander
Desertification- a lot of Africa is becoming desert
Bantu-the route language of all African languages
St. Augustine- born in Algeria, influential Christian. His writings became the basis for Christian thought
Humanism- focus on man, not god; education; the human body
Patron- the Medicis: financial supporters, admires the arts
Perspective- "vanishing point" technique becomes important
Indulgence- a pardon for sins
Predestination- the idea that god decides who goes to heaven before birth
Recant- to give up one view's
Theocracy- government run by church leaders
Simony- the act of selling a church position
Nepotism- giving a church position to a family member
Tith- giving 1/10th of your income as a tax to the church. The tithes were misused greatly by the priest in personal matters rather than on the church.
Fee for indulgences- instead of doing something because of your sin, you could pay off the priest and then not really get forgiveness from god.
Confession: confessing your sins to your priest.
Sacraments: holy ceremonies like marriage and funerals. Many times, the priest charged for these, although they should have been free. Are not in the bible therefore they are bull.
Rituals: ceremonies
Tetzel: (the pretzel) was in Wittenberg in 1715 and he marched around giving indulgences for money. He reminds Mrs. K of a guy at a baseball game selling pretzels and yelling "pretzels for sale" because he yelled and saying "indulgences for sale"
95 theses: the things that Martin Luther nailed on the door and they were the bad things about the church and he wrote what the church should do.
Anabaptists: separation of church and state, live a simple, plain, and strict life.
Henry VIII: broke up with the Catholic Church when the church refused to give him an annulment (make it like he was never married, rather than getting a divorce.) he was a wife killer! He established the Anglican Church, which is close to Roman Catholicism.
Queen Elizabeth tried to maintain control between Protestants and Catholics. She was the daughter of Henry VIII.
During the reformation, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. Jews lived in ghettos (restricted neighborhood reserved for persecuting minorities.), blood libel, Judaism and its books on trial.

The Christian continuum:
Anabaptists: Baptists, Quakers, and Amish
Calvinists: puritans (England), Dutch reform (Holland), Huguenots (France), Presbyterians (Scotland)
Lutherans
Anglicans
Roman Catholics: Jesuits

Lutheranism believed that priests and church authorities have on special powers, that priests should marry, that saints have no power and should not be worshipped, that there is salvation through faith and not practice of ritual, religious education that everyone should learn bible, and religious truth that bible and faith is more important than ritual and custom. Calvinism believed in all that, but also 3 more things: the view of god is that there is only one supreme power, that part of human nature is sin because everyone is born with the original sin of Adam and Eve, and predestination, that salvation of everyone was determined at their birth. Lutheranism came before Calvinism in Germany. Calvinism is a more extreme form of Lutheranism.

Humanism emphasized religious themes; used ancient learning to bring about religious and moral reform. An important person in humanism was Erasmus and sir Thomas More, and then subjects' matter of the works was the Greek edition of the New Testament: improved Latin translation of the bible.

In literature great advancements were made including works written in the vernacular as apposed to Latin, which was influences by Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes.

Jan van Eyck, Peter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens were Flemish Dutch painters
Francois Rabelais (French), William Shakespeare (British), and Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish) wrote literature in their vernacular.