Culture
Main article: Culture of EuropeThe culture of Europe can be described as a series of overlapping cultures; cultural mixes exist across the continent. There are cultural innovations and movements, sometimes at odds with each other. Thus the question of "common culture" or "common values" is complex.
The foundation of European culture was laid by the Greeks, strengthened by the Romans, stabilised by Christianity, reformed by the 15th-century Renaissance and Reformation, modernised by the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and globalised by successive European empires between the 16th and 20th centuries.
According to historian Hilaire Belloc, for several centuries the peoples of Europe based their self-identification on the remaining traces of the Roman culture and on concept of Christendom, because many European-wide military alliances were of religious nature: the Crusades (1095–1291), the Reconquista (711-1492), the Battle of Lepanto (1571).
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)