Renaissance rulers borrowed the Church as their cultural apparatus instead of building their own
Evidence
For the latter did not have its own apparatus, i.e. did not have its own cultural and intellectual organisation, but regarded the universal ecclesiastical organisation as being that. The only way in which this differed from the Middle Ages was the fact that religion was openly conceived of and analysed as an instrumentum regni . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2187
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- DEFINE: ‘Instrumentum regni’ — religion openly treated as an instrument of rule — marks the Renaissance break from the Middle Ages.