User talk:Pierrevan

It is argued that the Renaissance or Rinascimento started in Italy when Dante Alighieri stopped using Latin, and started writing the Divine Comedy in Italian for “everybody”, schooled or not. There is more to the Renaissance than just that; nevertheless the general perception still is that books in the local vernacular were the stepping stone of (Church)-independent thinking: the “rebirth” of man. What is less known however is that, the first poem in a vernacular language is probably a poem by the Georgian Shotha Rustaveli (1172-1216) ; but nearly a third of a century before Dante wrote his Divine Comedy (between 1308 and 1321), Ramon Llull a Mallorcan (Catalan) philosopher and very prolific writer had written around 1283 the arguably first European novel Blanquerna. This means that having opened the mind of people not schooled in Latin, one could argue that both Shotha Rustaveli and Ramon Llull were the first to launch the Renaissance. That fact alone is worth knowing a little be more about Catalan, the people, their history and culture.