The Renaissance left a legacy of art, learning and ideas that still shapes the world. Its most famous idea, the dignity of the human person, became a foundation of modern humanism and human rights. But that idea was not applied to everyone, and historians have increasingly asked who was left out.

Pico's oration

In 1486, a young nobleman and scholar, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, prepared a speech to open a public debate in Rome on nine hundred philosophical and theological theses. The debate was banned by the pope, but the speech, later known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man, became one of the most famous texts of the Renaissance. In it, Pico imagines God speaking to Adam: other creatures have a fixed nature, but humans have been given no fixed place or form, so that each person may shape himself freely, rising toward the divine or sinking toward the beasts by his own choices. For Pico, human dignity lay in this freedom to choose what to become.

Pico's idea echoes through later thought, from Enlightenment ideas of autonomy to modern human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by recognizing the “inherent dignity” of all members of the human family.

Learning and education

Humanist education, based on classical languages, history and moral philosophy, became the standard for European elites for centuries, and shaped the idea of the liberal arts still taught in colleges. The humanist habits of returning to original sources, comparing texts and questioning authority influenced later science, history and law.

Science

The Renaissance overlapped with the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Leonardo's anatomical studies, Vesalius's anatomy, published in 1543, and Copernicus's argument that the Earth orbits the Sun, published the same year, all drew on Renaissance habits of observation, mathematics and engagement with ancient authors, even when they overturned them.

Did women have a Renaissance?

In an influential 1977 essay titled “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”, the historian Joan Kelly argued that, for women, the period brought a loss of freedom compared with parts of the Middle Ages. Women of the upper classes were increasingly confined to the household and expected to be chaste, silent and obedient, while men enjoyed new opportunities. Some women did achieve fame as scholars, writers and artists: the humanist scholars Laura Cereta and Cassandra Fedele, the poet Vittoria Colonna, and the painter Sofonisba Anguissola, who became a court painter in Spain. Earlier, in 1405, Christine de Pizan had written The Book of the City of Ladies defending women against misogynist writers. But such women faced obstacles men did not, and their achievements were often treated as exceptions.

Slavery and conquest

Renaissance Italy had slavery. In cities such as Florence, Genoa and Venice, wealthy households owned enslaved people, many of them women from the Black Sea region, the Balkans and North Africa, who worked as domestic servants. Italian merchants took part in the slave trade in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

The European conquest of the Americas raised the question of human dignity in its sharpest form. In 1550 to 1551, at the city of Valladolid in Spain, two scholars debated before a royal council whether the Indigenous peoples of the Americas could rightly be conquered. The humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, drawing on Aristotle's idea that some people are slaves by nature, argued that they could. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who had witnessed the brutality of conquest, argued that Indigenous peoples were fully human, rational and free, and that conquest and forced labor were unjust. No clear verdict was issued, and abuses continued. But the debate showed that the same classical learning could be turned toward domination or toward recognizing universal humanity.

Renaissance and Universal Humanism

Universal Humanism holds that every person has equal worth, regardless of origin, sex or status. Renaissance thinkers such as Pico, Erasmus, Montaigne and Las Casas offered powerful ideas about human dignity, freedom and the folly of prejudice. Yet in practice, most Renaissance elites reserved full dignity for people like themselves. The challenge, then and now, is to take the best ideas of an age and extend them to everyone, including those its authors overlooked.

Worked example: one idea, two uses

Take the Renaissance belief that humans are rational beings capable of shaping themselves. Trace two ways it was used.

• Exclusion. Sepúlveda argued that some peoples lacked full reason and could therefore be ruled by others. Some humanists argued that women were less rational than men. The idea of rationality became a test that some people were said to fail.
• Inclusion. Las Casas argued that Indigenous Americans showed reason in their societies, languages and arts, and so deserved freedom. Christine de Pizan argued that women's apparent inferiority came from lack of education, not nature.

The same idea led to opposite conclusions depending on whether it was applied to all people or only to some. That is the lesson of the Renaissance for any theory of human dignity: its worth depends on how universally it is applied. A dignity that belongs to some but not others is not yet dignity at all.