Members of the adaptive Humanist Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1461 and 1482; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1562.1 Many of their parents were members of the heroic, civic-minded Arthurian Generation, who typically nurtured them in an overprotective way, at least relative to the standards of that time.
The Humanist Generation (of the Artist archtype in the Late Medieval Half-Saeculum, or Half-Cycle) passed a sheltered childhood during a bloody civil war (the War of the Roses), many of the elite attending safer schools abroad (on the Continent). Coming of age, they understood their mission was to embellish the new order. As young adults, they became the new humanists--Greek tutors, international scholars, ballad-writing poets, law-trained prelates, and literate merchants and yeomen. Hit during midlife by the Protestant Reformation, they adjusted awkwardly. Some wrapped themselves in Wolseyan opulence and refused to pay attention. Others waffled. A few (like the famed Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More) exquisitely satirized the reigning hypocrisy, stood firm for the old order, and paid the ultimate price. In old age, they were startled by a ruthless new radicalism that overwhelmed their own gracious refinements.
Their children were either the idealistic Reformation Generation or the first wave of the nomadic Picaresque Generation.
Birthyears for the Humanist Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation
Notes:
1. The information on this page has been adapted with permission from William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway Books [Bantam-Doubleday-Dell], 1997), p. 127. [Back to your place on this page.]
Other sources
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